Episode 225: November Writing Challenge, Part I

The Pulp Writer Show

In this week's episode we take a look at a November Writing Challenge and offer tips for new writers to develop a sustainable writing habit.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 225 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 1st 2024 and today we are discussing part one of our November Writing Challenge. Before we get into that, we will talk about my current writing projects- we’ll see where I'm at with that and do Question of the Week (because we did have time for Question of the Week this week).

First up, writing progress. I am 85,000 words into Cloak of Illusion, and I am hoping to finish the rough draft next week, if all goes well. I think we'll end up about in the neighborhood of 100,000 words for the rough draft (with possibly 5,000 words either way, see how it goes). I'm also 17,000 words into Orc Hoard. That will be the 4th Rivah Half-Elven book, and I'm hoping to have that out in December before the end of the calendar year.

In audiobook news, production on Shield of Conquest is done. It's all paid for and ready, and it's just working its way through processing on various platforms, so it should be available soon. And you get it on my Payhip store right now, if you don't want to wait for the other platforms. Audio for Cloak of Spears is almost done. I should have a file to proof soon, which is very exciting. And then Hollis McCarthy, who did Cloak of Spears, is also going to be working on Ghost in the Tombs and that should be out before too much longer and also Shield of Conquest was excellently narrated by Brad Wills. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.

00:01:30 Question of the Week

Now let's move on to Question of the Week. Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: do you keep a record of the books you have read? Obviously Goodreads is a giant website designed to do just that, but there are other methods, obviously. This question was inspired by one of those other methods. I was at a Barnes and Noble the other day and was bemused by the giant wall of reading journals that you can use to keep track of the books you have read. This elicited quite a few responses, this Question of the Week. They tend to fall into one of two camps, as we shall soon see.

Joaquim says: No. No time, at least not for the physical books, even an app supporting barcodes was not successful and was later discontinued. For ebooks it’s different because all your books are available on a list in Kindle/Digital Editions/Calibre (depending on their type).

Justin says: No, it would look like bragging. I am a speed reader and don't watch TV. Reading is my primary mode of leisure.

JD says: I have never even considered making a reading log. Surely that would be time better used for reading.

AM says: I use a dot grid journal to make my own reading log and enjoy customizing what I track and adding some artistic embellishments. It's just a fun offline project for me and it made me self-conscious of what I read when I tracked on Goodreads.

Adeline says: not keeping track at all. Doing that at the rate I go through books would just be a loss of a lot of time which could be spent reading.

Barbara says: No, I don't keep any record of the books I read. I've been a voracious reader since I figured out what the alphabet was for back in first grade, used to get in trouble in class for reading ahead. I read fiction and nonfiction, although not equally. I have favorite authors, some of whose books I reread regularly. My digital library contains over 2,000 books, most of which I've read and while I think I don't read all that fast, in reality I read something over 700 words per minute. What's worse, I retain most of what I read, but if someone wants to keep track of what he or she reads, that doesn’t bother me at all. Different strokes for different folks, as the song says.

Jesse says: If I pick one up I have already read and don't immediately recognize it within a paragraph or two, it is probably time for a reread.

Roger says: I buy a book before I read it, so my record is either on my bookshelves or on the Kindle.

Kim says: I used to note in each paper version when I read/reread the books. Since ebooks, I keep a spreadsheet of book title and series, author, date read, major characters, reading order, my own personal ranking. Helps me keep track of authors, their series, crossovers, same-universe stories, and when the next books are coming out. I track all of that.

Brandy says: It's impossible for me to do so. I reread whole series each time the new book comes out (yes, from the beginning). I’ll often proofread, read for review, read for pleasure, reference, and beta. I'm also a foreign language and capture reader for translation of books. It was recommended therapy to help with linear retention after seizures and was always my main hobby.

Jenny says: I use Goodreads but wish there was a better alternative.

Tracy says: I just use Goodreads.

Becca says: Since I started reading so much on Kindle, I've been letting it keep track of which books I've read. Me by myself, never kept track except in grade school when we had reading achievements.

So it looks like the common options were either nothing or Goodreads, but one other person did what I did, which is I've kept a spreadsheet of every book I've read since 2010, since it felt like I was reading less than I used to, and I wanted to keep track of it quantifiably, since hard data is better than feelings. So I think in the last 14 years, the most books I've read in a single year is around 110 and the lowest would be a little over 40, though I think this year I will probably end up around somewhere around 75. My spreadsheets are not as detailed as Kim's. I just keep track of the day I started, the day I finished the title, the author’s name, the genre, and whether or not it is an ebook or a paperback book.

00:05:12 Main Topic: Week 1 of November Writing Challenge

So on to our main topic of the week: week one of our November Writing Challenge. What do I mean by that? I talked a little bit about it last week, but what I mean is that I do get lots of questions about how to start writing or questions about whether or not National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo is worth doing. The difficulty of that is NaNoWriMo the organization is currently experiencing troubles. They've had some problems with some of their volunteers and this year they had a big blow up where they endorsed artificial intelligence in writing in a way that offended most of their user base and as I mentioned last week, I'm wondering whether that sort of shock therapy of writing 50,000 words in 30 days is the best approach for everybody. I mean, for some people it's a good thing. I usually write more than 50,000 words every month, but that's my job. But for someone else who’s starting out, that kind of shock approach might be a bit like yo-yo dieting. We talked about that last week, how it's better to lose 1 pound a month and have it stay off than it is to lose 5 pounds a month only for you to change habits and then gain 10 pounds back. I wonder for some people National Novel Writing Month might be the equivalent of that sort of yo-yo crash diet where you make this massive effort and that burns you out and you give up on it again.

If it feels like you're missing out when others are working on a bigger writing challenge this month and you want to start writing but feel overwhelmed, how about a smaller, more manageable writing challenge for the absolute beginner? That is what our November Writing Challenge will be-maybe 300 words a day or some other small number of your choosing, whether 300 or 500 or 1,000 or some other number. The key should be that the key is that it should be something small and something that you can realistically manage daily based on your current schedule and responsibilities and health and so forth.

The inspiration for this idea was, as you may know, for the last year I've had a transcriptionist working on my podcast, which has been very helpful because that's something I would never have had the time to do myself. She too wants to write a novel and has started writing one and has experienced challenges trying to start one. She often says she has felt overwhelmed at the idea of starting one, and so let's follow along with her progress this month as well. So let's start.

#1: What do you need to begin? Number one is a common question, technology/equipment. Someone once came to be concerned that they couldn't start writing because they didn't have software that “real” writers used only to be surprised that I used Microsoft Word and have been using Microsoft Word pretty consistently for the last 10 years. However, you don't even need to use Scrivener, Microsoft Word, or some other fancy software. I wrote Ghost in the Storm and Soul of Serpents and a couple of other books entirely using LibreOffice on Ubuntu Linux, which is of course free. That was back in like 2012/2013/2014 and back then I was more enamored of writing on, you know, small 10 inch screen laptops that I would install Ubuntu on and then enjoy the portability of them, that I could write anywhere using these very small laptops. That, however, was 10 years ago, and both the writer in question (me) and my eyes are 10 years older. These days I prefer to write on the biggest screen possible whenever possible, and my preferred laptop has a 17 inch screen which is less portable but definitely easier on the eyes. But the point is you don't need to spend a lot of money on software. You can write in Word on a cheap Windows 11 laptop. You can write on LibreOffice, which is and remains 100% free. You could write on a Chromebook using Google Docs. All you actually need is a word processor and some way to back up your work. Don't just store it locally. If you are writing Google Docs, you could save to the cloud automatically. Many other cloud services offer free tiers, and you can even email it to yourself every day to keep a backup because that way, if your computer and your backup flash drive are lost or damaged or stolen, you don't lose all your work.

Why can't you write using paper? You can if you want to. However, keeping track of progress would be tricky, because then you might have to do, ok, I'm going to write like, you know, a page a day instead of 300 words and then if you ever want to publish it, you will have to transcribe it to electronic format. So if you want to write on paper, go ahead and just to be aware that you are creating more work for yourself in the long term, if you are fine with that.

#2: The second thing we need to do is make a plan. I would suggest writing at least a simple outline and then make a plan for your word count goal for the month of November, whether it's 300 words a day or something else. You can write without an outline. I find that it's for myself, it's easier to write with an outline, and if you're an absolute beginner, outlining in advance might help you work through some plotting problems you would have otherwise run into later on in the book.

I would recommend blocking out time on your calendar for writing, even if it's only 5 minutes a day. Treat it like an appointment that you have to keep. You could churn out a few paragraphs on your lunch break or write a few sentences while on the bus or train ride home. I know of documented cases where people have written entire books on a commuter train using their phones and they thumb typed the entire rough draft. That might be a little extreme, though I imagine the younger generations who grew up with cell phones would be more comfortable with that, but it's certainly possible.

This may be the most important part. Make a plan for what you will do if something happens and you can't write as planned, whether it's a family emergency, something with your kids, something medical, house problems, or just any of the other random stuff that can come up in the course of day-to-day life. Plan for this possibility and write out what you'll do if it can't happen on that day. It's very easy to skip writing when many other things take up your day, and in fact, if you're just starting out, pretty much everything else that happens in your life tends to be higher priority than writing.

But if you only write when your day is perfect, you're not going to be writing much because perfect days are few and very far between in life. If you can make a plan for what to do if you have something come up and try to keep to your writing appointment, that will probably be the best way of making progress.

#3: The third thing we have to do is to prepare your mindset for writing and this is a big one, because people very often talk themselves out of doing things even before they start, and writers in particular seem to be very prone to this because they will talk themselves out of starting or psych themselves out halfway through the book or fall into the trap of endlessly repolishing the first chapter over and over until it is perfect.

So what are the most common mental mindset pitfalls that writers can encounter? The first one, of course, is perfectionism/fear of starting. The ways to combat this are to realize that it is hard to be a beginner, but everyone was a beginner once upon a time. You will get better with practice. Cloak of Illusion is going to be my 157th book but a long time ago, I just had one book or zero books that I was struggling to finish.

It's also a bad idea to edit as you go. Just keep going. A metaphor I've used that people have told me has found is helpful (from a quote from Shannon Hale) is that writing is like building a sandcastle in an empty sandbox. The first job of course, is to drag the bag of sand into the sandbox and fill up the sandbox, and the second step is to then actually build the sandcastle, which is editing. Creating the rough draft is filling up the sandbox and then the editing process is building the sandcastle but it's a bad idea to start building the sandcastle before you fill up the sandbox because you might psych yourself out and not finish filling up the sandbox, which is what you really need to do.

It doesn't matter if it's good at first, it just needs to get done. Get the words down for the day. It's also a good idea to find a way to silence your inner critic and the best way to do that is to not edit as you go. If you don't go back and constantly revise and tinker, then you are less likely to start doubting yourself. There's a time and place for revising and tinkering and editing, but that is after your rough draft is done. It is important to do things in their proper order. Another metaphor I use to explain this is once upon a time, I moved into an apartment that was on the third floor of a building with no elevator, and I have a lot of books. Naturally I had to carry all those books up three flights of stairs and into the new apartment. By the time I was done, I was probably in the best shape of my life.

I've found that is a useful metaphor for writing, because writing the first draft is carrying all those books up to the third floor of the apartment, and the editing process is once you have all the books in the apartment, the editing process, is arranging them properly on the shelf. Now you could start rearranging the books into proper order while they're still in the truck, but I think we'd all agree that was a waste of time because the books aren't getting out of the truck. They're not even going to stay in that order once you get them up the stairs. If you waste too much time rearranging the books in the truck, eventually the police are going to come by and complain that you're taking up the fire lane (not that this ever personally happened to me, of course). So it's good to finish the rough draft first and then focus on the editing.

Another mindset challenge is telling yourself that you don't have time. We've already talked about a few ways to get around this. Start by making your goal small. Even if you write only 300 words a day, if you do it every day in November, you will have about 9,000 words by the end of the month, which could be a chapter, several chapters, or even a short story. For myself when I started writing, I was still working a full-time job. So what I would do in my lunch hour (my lunch hour was literally an hour) was I would scarf down my food in the first 10 minutes and then spend the remaining 50 minutes typing as fast as I could on my laptop before it was time to get back to work. I wrote several different books that way. You’ll also find if you look honestly at your day, there are probably spots of wasted time where you could squeeze in a few 100 words on a phone or laptop if you brought it with you.

For example, there are times in the day when I find myself just looking at memes on the Internet and if I was squeezed for time and could carve out some time there, that would be a few hundred words. If you find yourself waiting in a car to pick someone up, that is an excellent time to squeeze out a few hundred words. I've done that many times. Waiting rooms are good for that too, and any situation where you find yourself with dead time, like you're on hold, you're in a waiting room. You're waiting to pick someone up, you're on some form of public transit. If you have a cheap laptop or you can type on your phone, that is an excellent time to squeeze out a few words.

Another possible mindset trap is just the intimidation factor of starting, and it might be helpful to remember back to when being creative didn't intimidate you, when creative work was a sort of play, and if you can recapture some of the playfulness of that, that may remove some of the intimidation factor. My transcriptionist found a quote from a writer named George Saunders on Dua Lipa’s podcast, and he said, “so much of being an artist is trying to trick your habitual nature, which likes safety and security and repetition and being sure, trying to trick that person out and go back to the kid you were at 13 or 14 who was just overjoyed to be making something.” There is definitely something to be said for that, too, you know, as a way to get past the intimidation factor and some self-doubt. So those are some of the mindset trip traps we might fall into, and hopefully some techniques for getting past them.

And finally, in future episodes, we will check in with my transcriptionist and see how she's doing with her writing progress, whether she has any questions. Since I'm recording this literally on the morning of November 1st, there's not any progress to report yet, but there is a question.

Why do you think so many people want to write books but never start? And I think we talked about that pretty well in the episode. There's a lot of activation energy and you have to get over perfectionism and the fear of being laughed at and the time problem and just overall the fear of starting, but as other wiser people than me have said, 80%, maybe even 90% of life is just showing up and doing the work. Like for example, I never knew how to replace front porch steps, but when the front porch steps started rotting, the alternative was trying to find a carpenter, which is difficult and expensive, or figuring it out how to do it myself. So I watched some YouTube videos and bought some lumber and paint and figured out how to do it myself. Would a professional carpenter have done it better? Probably. However, last night was Trick or Treating and I had about 80 kids and their parents come up and down the porch steps to get candy. The porch steps held and not a single person fell in. So sometimes showing up really is just good enough.

So anyone who is participating in some sort of writing challenge in November, whether NaNoWriMo or writing challenge month, if you want send any questions about the writing process and if time permits, I will include them in future episodes. You can send me an e-mail at [e-mail] or leave a comment on my blog or Facebook page. Please don't send me your story ideas or actual writing excerpts because I do not have time to read those and can't read them for legal reasons anyway.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes with transcripts on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.