Summer Planning

I haven't made a post since school ended for me because I have been super busy. Last week if I wasn't studying for my finals, I was getting ready for Girls Camp, which I've been at all week. So there hasn't been much time to fit in writing a blog post.

But the good news is that it's now summer.

Other than something going on mid-July and summer homework, I'm pretty much free.

I understand if you are not quite as free as I may be. Margaret is not free at all. She's doing two Summer Camps, two summer classes, and get a job, literary goals aside. She's also attempting to figure out some serious plot problems and write her first book, and she's determined to write some blog posts over the summer. This is technically her blog as well. We share it. Even though only 9% of the posts on here were written by her. But out post popular post was written by her, so I'll give her the 10%.

:D

I'm a true best friend.

But even if you are busy, summer is a great time to try to write/edit/work on your novel. I finished my novel not last summer but the summer before that. Planned it, wrote it all, finished I think two days before school started again. It's 6 hours of your day that's now free, more depending on how much homework you have every day.

The biggest problem with depending on summer to get serious work on your novel done is accountability. There's two to three months depending on your school schedule, which is more time than you get for NaNoWriMo. It's easy to slack off, especially during summer which is THE time for slacking off. The summer that I wrote my novel I decided that I was going to get up at 8:00 and work on my novel until 3:00 when I could do whatever I wanted to. The idea was that I was replacing school with novel writing time.

... yeah that last for like a week or two.

I'm not quite sure how I managed to write that whole thing.

The trick is, like most things, to figure out what works for you. The best advice I've found is to write in a different place than you do your internet searching. I probably wrote more in one day at the library than I did in a week at home just because I was in a different environment where I could focus completely on my task and not get distracted by family or "Oh, I should check that."

Another tip I've found very useful, is to write without music playing. I know I've done at least two posts about writing music and it setting the mood for what you're writing, but it's really easier to focus on what you're writing without it. 

If you are going to have it playing, because there are some scene you really do need music to write to, get it on a playlist or some sort of radio channel. iTunes or a Youtube playlist or Spotify or Pandora. Do NOT listen to songs individually on Youtube. That means that every 3 minutes or so you have to go back to your browser to replay or find a new song, which means that every 3 minutes you have contact with one of the biggest distractions there is.

DON'T DO IT.

It's not worth it, I promise.

And of course there is the average tips. Keep the area around where you're typing/writing free of distractions. I've spent a good 3-4 minutes in the middle of this post shinning my nails because the little block thingy was next to me. 

I find it's better to have full meals rather than just snack because then you're stopping to eat your chips or carrots, depending on how healthy you are.

The best tip of all though is that you really need to just get into a habit. Humans are naturally creatures of habit. It takes about a month to create or break a habit, so try to find what works the best for you and STICK TO IT (See my post on consistency). 

I would also like to take the time to point out that this is really where we as young writers have an advantage over most adult writers. Only adults employed by school systems really have any summer breaks, and even then a lot of them live off teacher salaries and have to work during the summer to survive. But most of us are probably still being provided for by our parents and are more or less free during the summer time. We're practically given two to three months of time that we could spend writing. 

Take advantage of it! 

This is my last real summer of high school, so your can bet I'm going to. My goal for this summer is to try to edit my book, naturally. My goal is to be able to start sending my manuscript off during Senior year. The two biggest things I need to accomplish with my novel over the summer is figure out a sub plot and what I'm doing with my bad guy.

Have a great summer guys!

Fan Fiction: An Argument for It

Both of us have mentioned it at one time or another, but that’s because it’s meant a lot to both of us.

Fan Fiction.

Most of you have probably heard of it, if you don’t write it yourself. Let’s be honest here, online blog for teenage writers? Most of us probably know about it. This fall I have been writing fan fiction for five years. Margaret started writing it a few months before I did. It’s how we met. We were both writing fan fiction for a website called Artemis Fowl Confidential.

You can see why I consider fan fiction one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. That being said, I am not ignorant to the ugly side of it. There is a lot of ugliness.

A lot.

Just in case you don’t know, fan fiction is a story that is written by a fan of a book/movie/show ect. These fans come up with stories or ideas about the characters or the world and write them. If you want a new ending, you can write it. If you think of something that was mentioned in the book that was never realized, you can write it or find it.

That of course opens the door to quite a bit of ugly. When it comes to couples in the fandom (a mix of the word fan and kingdom, it’s the collection of fans of a certain book/movie/show ect. and everything that they do to show their love for it) things get really ugly. There are crazy shippers (people who support certain people in a relation’ship’) who will attempt to murder you if you try to tell them that their ship is wrong or not going to happen.

Not only that, but you’re sticking a bunch of (usually) inexperienced writers in a situation where they can go crazy and write anything they want. That leads to a LOT of bad writing. Probably only about half of the fics (the term applied to a fan fiction story) you find on FanFiction.net (the main website for fan fiction) are legible, despite the fact that they’re all typed. Bad grammar, poor sentence structure, horrible characterization, cliché ideas, cliché characters that are basically their attempts to stick themselves in the story… We’ve mentioned it before in the Non Cliché Protagonists Post. Mary Sues are the hated Queens of Fan Fiction-dom.

And that’s not even going into the PWP (porn without plot)/M (Mature rated) fics, or how it’s a gateway into the worst parts of fandom.

All this being said, it’s probably done more for my writing than anything else I’ve done.

First, most obviously, it’s practice. I mentioned in the last post about consistency ( Consistency is the Goal to Meet Your Goal) that I’ve written 2000+ words of a story pretty consistently every week for the past three years. That’s a fan fic. If you start at the first chapter and make your way all the way through to where I’m writing now, you can tell that there’s been growth in my writing.

Just the simple act of writing constantly improves your writing. And if you’re a dedicated fan of whatever it is you’re writing, you will probably be writing pretty consistently (sometimes too consistently when it interferes with writing your actual material).

Not only is it practice, but if you’re in the right fandom/website, a lot of time there are other writers who are willing to give you advice or tell you what you did right or did wrong. Especially when you’re trying out a new style it’s a great place to try to out because you can tell from the reviews whether the readers think that you pulled it off or not.

Which brings me to another valuable skill I’ve learned from my years of writing fan fiction. Learning how to take constructive criticism. Not everyone is going to be nice. In fact, depending on your skill level they often will not be. But there is a difference between someone just being plain rude/mean (flamers) and people who are offering constructive criticism which is a fine line that you learn after enough reviews. Being able to tell the difference and bending your pride enough to at least take someone’s advice is an incredible useful skill.

In fact, it’s a skill that’s not only useful in writing, when you’re getting rejections from agents or editors or either one is giving you suggestions for what to do with your manuscript, but it’s just useful in life.

You learn how to develop characters. The mistake almost every new fan fiction writer makes is trying to write an OC (original character) that turns into a Mary Sue or warps one of the characters so that they’re completely OOC (off original character). I did it. My first major fan fiction involved my OC, Amanda, making the main character, a character who is not interested in romantic involvement at all, fall in love with her. She also spoke eight languages, had over 200 IQ points, came from a poor family, was beautiful… It didn’t help that the title of the story was “Amanda’s First Adventure”.

You learn to not make those mistakes. Making a mistake like that will (hopefully) keep you from getting a book picked up by any agent or editor.

It’s also an introduction to all different sorts of formats and styles. You can do drabbles, one shots, three shots, full length stories. You can write stream of consciousness, traditional, interrupted, scene skipping, flashbacks. Decide whether you like first person or third person. Try present tense. Figure out how to pace a scene so that it’s not going too fast or dragging on. Learn that you really do need to plan out what’s going to happen in a story or face epic writers block (See Margaret’s post on the Brick Wall from Hell).

Maybe even make a best friend.

Consistency is the Goal to Meet Your Goals

I think that just about anyone can agree that the key to success in most things is consistency.

I talked about this a bit in my post about New Year’s Resolutions, because it really is a universal principle. Practice makes permanent as my English teacher says, and it really does. One of the number one thing that people look for when hiring employees is consistency. They want people who will be excellent and continue to be excellent.

Now I have never been the best at starting habits. It’s hard. I forget, I get lazy, other things get in the way. And not all things require it. Some things are just things you bang out in one sitting, you don’t need to do the same thing every single day. You know how I said in New Year’s Resolution to edit for 20 minutes every day? Hasn’t happened. But I have started posting pretty consistently every Friday. Sure I skip a week here or there, but for the most part I usually manage to get something up.

Trust me, if I could tell you what made the difference or what it was that made it so I did one and not the other, I would use that secret all the time and would soon become the perfect person. Two weeks ago I started writing in my journal, and have since done so every night since. Do I know why it worked this time and not the 5 billion other times I’ve tried to start a habit of writing in a journal? No clue!

But I do know that most of the really cool things I’ve managed to accomplish writing wise have happened because I’ve been stubborn about consistency.

I think we can all say getting a novel itself requires some measure of sheer headed stubbornness. You have to refuse to let the writer's block get the best of you or keep working even when you want to do anything else. 

There is a set of stories that I write online, and I’ve updated them almost every single Sunday for the past two and a half years. Most chapters are 2000 words or more. I’ve all together written nearly 300,000 words for that story. And I’ve gotten quite a few fans off it, several of whom have told me that if I ever chose to write a full length novel they would be interested in checking it out.

Writing this blog once every Friday. Usually most writing bloggers say to update once a day or two days, and while we're not quite there (baby steps, baby steps), writing once a week has actually done a lot to the number of people visiting the blog. It’s not exactly about to become one of the most popular writing blogs ever, in fact when you Google search “Blog for young writers by young writers” which is the tag line for this blog, it doesn’t show up in the first five pages. But if you search “Two books before twenty” it is the first option!

It hasn’t always been.

Now there is a measure of quality. Quality is also very important. Even if I updated every single day and Margaret updated every other day so that some days we had two posts, it wouldn’t mean much unless we had a post that actually attracted people’s attention. And you have to have quality to keep people there/here.

But then again… there are a lot of people who manage to make a lot of money without writing anything spectacular, but they write a lot of it. John Grisham has written more or less the same lawyer story 20 times. Most of the “Kindle Millionaires” (people who have made a million or more dollars selling e-books) aren’t writing anything that would change the world of writing forever (if they weren’t making a lot of money off it online)… but they are writing a lot of it.

Consistency matters. You can hide writing skills that aren’t the best with consistency. But you certainly can’t hide inconsistency with good writing. All the best writing in the world will mean nothing if you can’t finish the book.

Of course the best solution is to have both. That’s the best way to go. But you have to have consistency and persistency.