Once upon a time, I was anti-mock covers. I thought it was a little weird to put up a fake book cover on your site for a book you’re drafting or trying to sell. Then I wrote up my projects page, and it looked . . . bare. So I made up some passable mock covers (some obviously more time consuming than others).
Usually, I’ve waited until I was done or nearly so to make these. But since October was a “planning” month for NaNo, and I was only doing 50,000 other things, I spent a day making the “ideal” version of the cover:
Not 100% perfect (or, you know, licensed), but pretty dang good. Just looking at it gets me excited to write!
Obviously you don’t want to take off a day in the middle of NaNo to play around with a graphics program to make a cover no one else might ever see—but in about 20 minutes, you can throw together something that can inspire you.
Seriously, I tried it. I used a picture I pinned of one character, and Googled screencaps from a movie the other character was in (screencaps found here). Then I turned to Flickr for pictures of a rune stone (by Paul W. Locke). Some Magic Wand tool, cut/paste, resize, color balance, and add text, and voila! I put together a crude version of the above.
Inspiration in twenty minutes? That’s a bargain.
How do you find inspiration quickly?
Photo credits: Maggie Lawson by unknown (via listal), Garrett Hedlund from TRON: Legacy (found here), Viking coin by Ancient Art, Kensington runestone monument by Paul W. Locke
The Internet is a fabulous thing. I do a lot of my research for my books on the Internet, from looking at historical sources to contemporary locations to costumes to fact checking and even some plot ideas. I used bookmarks for years to try to keep track of these disparate sources, but frankly it was too hard to find what I needed in my notes, especially when I only had one or two sentences that I really needed from a long article.
And then I found Evernote. It’s a website where you can store all kinds of information: pictures, text, whole websites. It can also “clip” these notes from your desktop, or, via a smartphone app, your photos, etc. You can not only tag the notes you add, but also group your “notes” by topics, separated into “notebooks.” Probably the best part is that you can search your notes to find just what you’re looking for I *think* there are other good programs that can do this, but this is the only one I’ve used, and I like it.
So what’s this got to do with NaNo? When you’re writing as fast as you can, and you need to stop to look something up, or to find something you know you looked up when you were plotting on or around October 23, or to remember that one really cool idea you had from that weird news article that would be perfect right here, instead of trying to dig through your bookmarks or search your web history, you just go to your account, and either search your notes, or look through the notebook for this book, and you’re set!
I also like this because I’ve used it to save research on ideas I might write later—much later. Like this NaNo, I’m writing an idea that I’ve been thinking about for probably two years. Some of my notes on the pseudohistory I’m unapologetically using were clipped in July 2010. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to remember a lot of the things I’d need when I was starting my research, until I saw the name of the notebook on Evernote. Voila! Lots of cool facts that I wouldn’t have to hunt down again!
How do you keep track of your research so you can find it when you need it?
I’m sure that at least some of us took off a little time last week to enjoy time with our families. Even during NaNoWriMo, it’s okay—important, possibly even vital—to step away from the computer and connect with reality and the strangers living in your house for a while. It gives us perspective on people—and our work. Not only do we need more material for writing ;), but we all need some human connection at least sometimes. Plus, time away from our writing gives us time to think, brainstorm, and recover. (I take every Sunday off.)
But now it’s time to get back to work. If you’re thinking ahead, you can leave yourself notes for the next scenes—but sometimes I can’t make sense of or find inspiration from my cryptic notes. Over at Write It Sideways a few weeks ago, they had a great article on6 Ways to Reconnect with Your Work-In-Progress. Most of them apply more to a work you’ve been away from longer—and have more than three days to finish. (By the way, you have three days left, including today.)
So, to adapt their suggestions to a Nano novel:
Read the last chapter or two you’ve written: I know the Nano site advises not to read back and plunge ahead, but when you’re totally lost, it’s time to take stock of where you were going.
Reread your outline: tell me you have one. (I do, but the entire first half went pretty far astray from the plan. Okay, and the second half did, too. Um… But hey, I’m totally on-cue for the ending from my outline: “Big, big set piece. Major battle. Looks like villain gets away. Slay the dragon twice, roll out the big guns, and come away victorious, rich, less emotionally scarred, and in love.” Yep. That.)
Make sure it’s not a story issue: sometimes we have a hard time writing because there’s something wrong with the structure of your story or your characters, but our subconscious hadn’t clued in our conscious mind yet. Make sure that’s not what’s holding you up.
Recalculating…: If your story or your outline has gone astray, look again at the milestones you originally wanted to hit, like the third plot point or the finale. If you really just want to finish, you could even just squeeze the last 5000 words out of those scenes, and fix it all later. Isn’t that the point of Nano?
Brainstorm: just out of ideas? Try a brainstorming session like this one described at DIY MFA. Come up with as many ideas as you can. You’re sure to come up with some stinkers, some less useful ones, and some out there ones—but all you need is one or two good ones to get moving again!
Tap into your inspiration: whether you turn to an image pinboard, a playlist, or a cover—or you can do any of those now!—or you just look back at the things that gave you the ideas that convinced you to write this story, tapping into your inspiration again is a great way to get the creative juices flowing again.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking about pulling out an older novel in December to try to fix, and I’ll probably use several of these tips and the original six to get back into the right mindset for this book.
Twitter can be great for sprinting with a writing friend. But sometimes, I just don’t feel up to publicly admitting my word counts, and other times I just can’t turn off the distractions.
When I just have to power through some words to hit my goal and the rabbit hole of the Internet keeps sucking me in, I turn to Write or Die by Dr Wicked. (I think the name pretty much illustrates the concept, eh?)
“Dr. Wicked” offers an online version and a $10 desktop version of his Write or Die app. The concept is pretty simple: it’s a text box and a timer. You can program it with a time goal or a word count goal, and then you get typing. You can also get it for the iPad for $9.99. To use the web app, go to the site, click on the Web App tab in the sidebar and enter your goal.
If you stop for too long (the exact length of time depends on what “level” of punishment you pick), the screen background turns pink, then red—and then an annoying sound begins to play (a crying baby, “Mm Bop” by Hanson—seriously). I’ve heard that in the strictest mode, if you stop too long it starts erasing your words.
It’s kind of a last resort when my mind is on the fritz, but looking at my outline to figure out where I’m going and forcing myself to get those words down is the kick in the pants I need.
The only drawback: the online version has to be formatted when you put it into your manuscript. Here’s how I do it. Since I’m writing on the Internet, I skip lines between paragraphs. I paste the words into Notepad, and make sure Word Wrap is turned off. Then it’s easy to take out the extra returns (and insert tabs if you’re putting those in). Then I paste into Word and Find and Replace the quotes (just use the plain quotes in your Find and Replace box; it turns them into Smart Quotes automatically) and apostrophes, and if you used em dashes (convert two hyphens to —). And voila! It’s pretty again!
What do you think? How do you force yourself to get the words out when your brain wants to wind down?
It’s today! The final push! You can do it! In fact, you may have already. This month has been pretty much the greatest of my writing career. You still have a few more hours to make it yours!
Run Type, type, type!
We’ll share our successes tomorrow so anyone who’s still working won’t feel bad. And if you’ve already hit your 50,000—way to go!—don’t forget to validate on NaNoWriMo.org before midnight so you can claim your winner goodies!
I set goals all the time—and I’ve found the easiest way to achieve my goals is on autopilot.
That doesn’t mean coasting through the month, or setting absurdly low goals so I can achieve them, though. Like I mentioned yesterday, that means scheduling for me. I kind of beasted Nano 2011, and—especially the first week—I managed to do this without the world falling down around the ears. I’m the mom, of course, and I set the pace of the household. I do most of the housework. So how did I write 5000-6000 words a day (hours and hours of work) without running out of meals and clean underwear for the family?
Planning.
I was already used to one very useful phone alarm: a 15 minute warning to the time we need leave for school. So I decided to expand on that and use the phone alarm to remind me to do laundry (and switch it, fold it, and hand it off to the kids to put away), work with the kids to empty the dishwasher, read with the kids, start dinner and go to bed on time.
Dinners were also planned: I took the calendar for the month and planned out our meals (actually, when I did this for 2012, I planned for the rest of the year because I found so many great recipes—you can see the online ones on my Pinterest). Last year, I focused on quick meals, slow cooker meals, meals I’ve squirreled away in the freezer, and family favorites. Themed nights were also big helps: Meatless Monday, Favorites Fridays, etc. It took a couple hours to write it out, but then for the rest of the month, meal planning was handled and I could just look at the calendar to make out my shopping list.
Even blog posts (on four blogs!) were planned the month in advance. Topics and dates went on the calendar. I made up post drafts for each of those days with the topics all ready to go. I stockpiled topics and full posts. On weekends, I filled in the remaining posts and scheduled them to go.
It actually went really well—until I finished my novel. And then I let a lot of it fall apart. But all that advanced planning helped me to maintain a good routine, be productive and run the house better than I usually did.
So how can that apply to other goals?
Schedule them now.
If you want to write 1000, 2000 or 5000 words a day, pick a time and put it in your schedule. (Doing it at the same time each day can help, too.) Unplug from the Internet. Schedule a time with the fewest kids distractions around. I’ve used a handy browser plugin that would block certain time-wasting websites during certain times of the day—another helper.
5000 words a day was my goal during Nano 2011. I broke it into chunks and assigned each chunk a time: 1500 in the morning, 1500 in the afternoon and 2000 in the evening.
This works for other goals, too. If you want to read a certain number of books next year, start collecting recommendations. Figure out whether you prefer reading on an eReader/mobile device (if you have one) or paper book. I like library books since they come with built-in deadlines—and, oh yeah, they’re free.
If you’re trying to research a project, make a list of resources, get them and give yourself a timeline to read them.
If you want to lose weight, schedule your exercise sessions with yourself. Make up healthy meal plans in advance. Buy and prepare healthy snacks.
We all know that goals should to be broken down into steps to be achievable. But what it really comes down to is to just do it, to quote Nike. Little reminders and baby steps help me.
All right, it’s official: I’m doing Nano (aka National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo). Feel free to add me as a buddy on the Nano site. You might be able to find me under the enigmatic name of “JordanMcCollum.”
I’m a loose plotter, so I’m spending the month of October preparing. I’m getting my plot outlined, getting to know my characters, researching the facts and the settings, pondering plot points and villains and subplots and schedules (mine, not the characters’)!
As I’ve worked on all these things, I’ve had to review all my favorite plotting methods and character posts—on others’ blogs, and on my own. So if you’re getting ready for NaNoWriMo, I’ll be sharing tips, strategies and advice to help you get the most out of your Nano experience.
We’ll start with some writing resources on my site that I’ve been thinking about and studying, and I hope they might help you prepare, too.
The plot thickens, my series on plotting, highlights plot structures and methods including the three act structure, Larry Brooks’s story structure, the Snowflake method, the Hero’s Journey, and now Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat (also available as a PDF, but it hasn’t been updated to include the Save the Cat posts).
Creating sympathetic characters—while you can edit a great deal of sympathy into your characters, keeping these things in mind as you write can help you get it right the first time.
Character arcs—last year, this was the series I needed most, specifically this post on finding your character’s arc. (Is it awesome or sad when you find the most amazingly helpful resource was written by you two years ago?)
And, depending on how you write, you might be able to try out some new techniques with Deep POV or dialogue—or save those for editing.
Although my normal blog schedule is only 2-3 times a week, I’ll be blogging a little extra as we prep for Nano to try to share the resources and inspiration I’ve been saving up!
Warning: if you’re not done with Nano (or don’t have a comfortable bumper), you might want to file this away to read and experiment with another day.
If you are done with Nano (or nearly so), I have a free plotting/revision roadmap which you can get just by signing up for my newsletter (which is also pretty awesome, if I do say so myself).
All right, with that out of the way, today’s little bit of inspiration comes courtesy of my friend Deanna Henderson. She taught a class on creating a book trailer for free using Animoto at an online conference from iWriteNetwork last month. It took me 45 minutes to an hour total to make trailers for this year’s and last year’s Nano novels—once again, I didn’t bother with the instructional video, and hunting down good photos takes time.
Here’s last year’s Nano novel trailer:
Animoto offers paid options, which let you make longer videos, download your videos to your computer and generally just more, but the free options will let you create a 30-second video with your own photos, music and script and share it on the Internet. Not bad for free!
Here are the instructions from Deanna’s blog, with [commentary from me]:
These can be for anything; book trailers, author profiles, blog tours etc… let your imagination be your guide.
Step 2: Choose a style/template for your video [Note that the templates marked “Pro” are not offered in the free plan. Stick to the ones without the “Pro” label. I used Water for the one above, and Inkwell for this year’s.]
Step 3: Click on the small type below the purchase button that says Make a 30 second video for free
Step 4: – OPTIONAL – Watch the Animoto tutorial video, or close the box, continue to step 5
Step 5: Add pictures and/or video clips **Only use pictures you own the copyright for** [Big, HUGE life-changing tip: you can find FREE, licensed photos on Flickr (and several other places). You can use the advanced search’s Creative Commons options, or you can simply to go this search link and type in your query. If this is a book trailer, be sure you’re using works that are licensed for commercial use. Some of the photos require you to attribute the photos; I do this in the description section of the video for all the photos in order. You’re welcome.]
Step 6: Add desired text. [I’m just full of the hints today! It seems you can get more “slides” if you skip the Header portion.]
Step 7: Drag text to desired location. [You can drag and drop the elements of your video.]
Step 8: Add music. [Seems like a lot of the music that comes with Animoto is super upbeat, so if your novel isn’t, may I recommend “Redrum” by Ugress? For the video at the top, I used a song I licensed for something else.]
Step 9: Preview your video, it will take a minute to buffer first, be patient. When you watch it this time, the quality isn’t as high as it will be in the final product, don’t worry.
Step 10: Title your video, and give a description. [Where I put the photo and music credits]
Step 11: Click the Produce button.
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Wait
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Wait
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Wait
**** Step 12: Now you can watch your video!
On the video’s display page, there are also buttons and links to share your video via Facebook, Twitter, and email. If you want to embed your video on your site (like I have here), Click on the “More” button beside the other sharing buttons. From there you have options to share via Pinterest, Twitter and a few popular blogging platforms. You can also use the “Embedded video” tab at the top of the popups to get the code.
Last year’s video only took a few minutes because I only had to find 2 new photos, plus one I’d already Pinned. This year’s took much longer with all the image and music hunting. I’ve already shared this year’s video, but here it is again:
And the truth is: I totally watched this when my motivation was lagging as I was writing the MS. I think it’s especially helpful for that purpose because it gets down to the core conflict that made me want to write the book in the first place, so it was a great source of inspiration for me. I tracked down the song as well, since it had become linked with the book in my mind, and found it was free to download. So when that came up in my playlist, I was motivated all over again.
What do you think? Would you use Animoto for your inspiration video, or your book trailer? Come join in the conversation!
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And then I found 
As I’ve worked on all these things, I’ve had to review all my favorite plotting methods and character posts—on others’ blogs, and on my own. So if you’re getting ready for NaNoWriMo, I’ll be sharing tips, strategies and advice to help you get the most out of your Nano experience.