Becoming an Every Day Novelist: The Every Day Novelist, #2

By J. Daniel Sawyer

Thirty Days from Idea to Publication

Think you can't write a great novel in a month? Think again. Most of the best novels in history were written in a month or less. Professionals do it all the time. And with Becoming an Every Day Novelist, so can you.

Prolific author J. Daniel Sawyer walks you through the process in this day-by-day, step-by-step guide to going from blank page to a publication-ready novel...and doing it every month.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Daniel Sawyer
• Release date: Apr 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386741466

J. Daniel Sawyer

WHILE STAR WARS and STAR TREK seeded J. Daniel Sawyer's passion for the unknown, his childhood in academia gave him a deep love of history and an obsession with how the future emerges from the past. This obsession led him through adventures in the film industry, the music industry, venture capital firms in the startup culture of Silicon Valley, and a career creating novels and audiobooks exploring the worlds that assemble themselves in his head. His travels with bohemians, burners, historians, theologians, and inventors led him eventually to a rural exile where he uses the quiet to write, walk on the beach, and manage a pair of production companies that bring innovative stories to the ears of audiences across the world. For stories, contact info, podcasts, and more, visit his home page at http://www.jdsawyer.net

Book preview

Introduction

A NaNoWriMo Every Month

Over the next thirty days (give or take), this book will walk you through writing a novel, from start to finish, with an eye toward making this daily discipline and monthly productivity a normal, attainable baseline in your creative life. That's fifty to one hundred thousand words in a month, from your mind onto the printed page, forming a story that will pull your audience through from Once upon a time... to ...and they died happily ever after (you can tell what kind of novels I write, can't you?).

And, if this book does its job correctly, it won't help you do it just once—or even just once a year—but over and over again, every month.

You know, like the pros do. The reason they can do it, and you can't (yet)?

They know something that you don't. Here it is:

Words are not the difficult part. Words are easy. Between email, chats, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and [insert your favorite social networking venue here], we all write thousands of words per day—many of them spinning yarns, relating anecdotes, and fabricating excuses (all of which are forms of storytelling).

The problem is not the words, but the way you think about them. This book is about head games, since almost everything that obstructs a writer resides between the ears: dogmas, illusions, misapprehensions, phobias, paranoias, delusions, and other inhibitions that separate you from your creativity.

Conquer those—and marry that determination to a passion for learning, experimentation, and a touch of business sense—and you've got the recipe for a career as a novelist (or, indeed, any creative artist).

This book contains a series of exercises, lessons, and meditations to help you build the skills to level up your productivity until you're producing like a professional. Some of them I've developed myself by cross-applying training I received for previous careers. The vast majority of them I've collected from mentors, friends, and others further down the course than I am.

So, Dan, how far along are you, exactly? You should ask that of of anyone you're looking to learn from. If you want to master something, you need to learn from people who are further along the road you want to travel. Self-help gurus are about a penny-per-gross (and a lot of them really are gross). Someone selling you a program for improving in area X had better have some demonstrated expertise in area X—otherwise, you've got nothing other than slick marketing and warm-and-fuzzy feelings upon which to base your decision to invest your time and money.

So, here's my experience:

At the time of this writing, in my adult career I have released seventeen novels, three nonfiction books (not including this one), two short story collections and a further twenty-three short story singles, published nearly three dozen articles (most of them on computer geekery, a couple of them philosophical treatises for a popular audiences, and a further few on cinematic storytelling and neurocognition), and have a further six novels and fifteen short stories at various stages in the publication process. I've also written a number of screenplays (even got paid for one of them), a slew of poetry, and, at one point, a philosophy book that mercifully never made it to publication.

Before my days as a professional novelist, I was an independent filmmaker, an audio/video producer, a network and security consultant, a member of several startups in silicon valley, and the CEO of two (ultimately unsuccessful) companies—one in the entertainment business, the other in the computer security field.

I do not currently make a living from my fiction—but I do make a comfortable and growing secondary income from it. My primary income, at the time of this writing, comes from producing audiobooks.

I am approaching middle-age, and in the early middle-stages of my writing and publishing career. I'm close enough to the beginning to remember (with great vividness and terror) the struggles of the early novelist. I'm far enough past those struggles to appreciate why they happen, how to manage them, and how they develop as a career develops. This book is intended for writers with between zero and five professional-level books under their belts, who want to transition from being a hobbyist (or artist) to being a professional.

A Novel In A Month

The write a novel in a month notion underpinning this book is one I've shamelessly lifted from NaNoWriMo (the NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth), an Internet-driven social phenomenon whereby, every November, people around the world attempt to do the impossible job of writing a novel in a month.

Many of them succeed.

And most of those that succeed never use that success as a springboard into a career as a novelist. Frankly, most of them have no desire to.

There are a number of reasons to do NaNoWriMo: the value of a challenge, the desire to check something off one's bucket list, the opportunity to use social solidarity to conquer a fear or fulfill a dream, or to see if you might have it in you to be a novelist after all.

I did my first NaNoWriMo in 2006. I had written books before: nonfiction books, which were well received, fiction books which stayed in the drawer, screenplays (three of which were produced, one of which sold to a Canadian studio and was never produced, and others which never found a home), and articles for major tech magazines. I was familiar with the notion of writing fast and to deadline, but the thought of applying that ethos to my fiction terrified me. It seemed impossible.

But it wasn't.

I didn't win that first NaNoWriMo, but I did get farther than I expected. I failed upwards, and it is not a coincidence that my first professional novel was finished the following year. It wasn't until 2010 that I did my first novel-in-a-month, and that year I did three.

NaNoWriMo taught me how. The arbitrary goal of do a novel in a month meant that, for that month, I had to somehow get my butt planted to a chair every day, in front of a keyboard, and produce 1700 words or more each day.

What no one told me at the time, and what it took me a few more years to discover, was that this is a professional pace. 1700 words per day is in the middle-low end of the spectrum of what it takes to make a living as an undiscovered, unknown genre fiction author in today's world.

And it's only two or three hours of work per day.

It also taught me that all the excuses that writers bandy about when discussing writing amongst themselves (I'm too busy, I can't find time with my day job, I'm just not feeling the story, I'm not in the right head space for this one, Inspiration just isn't coming for me today, etc.) are different ways of saying I've let my fear and stress get in the way of my creativity.

And living by its ethic—the ethic of writing every day—taught me very quickly that many of the other fears we all harbor (What if I run out of ideas? What if I'm not original enough? What if I suck? What if I'm too boring to tell a good story? Won't I start repeating myself if I write too much? Doesn't it take care and many drafts to craft a great novel?) are not only wrong, they're exactly wrong.

Over the course of this book, I hope to show you how they're wrong, and why, in a way that will open up your creative world to a future limited only by your timidity.

So let's get started...

with the preface.

Preface

Before You Start Your Novel-in-a-Month

Tomorrow you will begin your novel-in-a-month (pretend this is true for the moment, even if you plan to use this book a different way). If you've been contemplating a challenge like this, you may already have a story in mind. You may, in fact, have vast outlines and character sketches of a kind of depth that would cause FBI snoops to run in terror and make role-playing gamers hide their heads in shame.

This chapter is a personal plea, from me to you, to ignore all of that glorious pre-production you've spent so much time, energy, and creativity on.

Throw them out.

With creative endeavors, the first idea—the one that gets you to start a project—is rarely your best idea. It's the second and third ideas, the ones you stumble across in your journey from the dugout to the batter's box, that make you come alive and sparkle.

More important than that, though, is the fact that the idea that you've invested so much time in pre-planning is stale. You've savored it, explored it from every angle, and now all that's left to do is to put the words down.

It doesn't hold a promise of joy for you anymore. There's no anticipation of discovery, of novelty or frisson. All you can hope to do is to cast your perfectly-planned sculpture into marble.

Stories don't work that way. Stories unfold in the telling. The best stories, the most memorable ones, are not the ones that are planned out from the beginning. There may be high notes the teller wants to hit on the way from point A to point Z, but the journey between those high points is often unmapped. The tale may change radically in the telling.

It's always been this way. Stories of all sorts—jokes, legends, campfire tales, anecdotes, and memories always change a little every time they're told. Sometimes they change a lot. The story emerges from the interaction of the teller with his world, whether that world is a live audience, or the printed page, or a rock'n'roll band.

Because yes, even songs change in the singing. Anyone who's ever been to a live show by their favorite band can attest, the venue alters the sound of the music, the guitarist uses different licks, the drummer improvises different fills, and the vocalist will sometimes riff off whole new verses on the spot just for that audience, just for that night, in a version of the top-ten hit that nobody will ever hear again, unless they've thought to record it on their cell phone from their place in the audience.

Story is a living thing. And the more fully you map the territory around a story, the more staid and static the story will become in your mind—and that means it will be more difficult to stick with through the process of writing it all down.

When you finish your book, nobody at the other end will ever know whether you started from scratch or worked from that mountain of pre-prep you've done. It won't make the slightest bit of difference to your readers which way you did it, because all they care about is whether it's a story that moves them.

That's all.

Everything else that you associate with your love of literature—the geeking out over your favorite author's writing process, the fawning over language, the little jolt of pleasure at a perfectly timed plot twist, the deep rapture at the unexpected confluence of theme and character and plot and mood and phrasing to create the unforgettable moments that haunt you in your dreams—those are mostly the attitudes and desires and joys you take as a wanna-be writer, rather than as a reader.

Readers who don't secretly wish they were writers tend to remember stories in macroscope, not in microscope, just like moviegoers remember how much fun they had watching Star Wars, not how many chills they got because the medals ceremony was a shot-for-shot parroting of a particular sequence in Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will.¹

If you didn't get that reference, it's because you're not a film geek (which proves my point).

Going with your second idea, and doing it before you really understand what you've got your hands on or have had any chance to develop it, is what Dean Wesley Smith calls Writing Into The Dark (he has a book on the topic by that title, in fact—I recommend it). It's the place most professional writers end up, because it almost always yields quicker, fresher, better-quality results than arduously pre-planning and endlessly revising a story.

Some Tricks To Getting There

Of course, jumping straight into a story blindly and then writing off into the dark can be downright terrifying, because you don't know how to do that yet. Trust me, I've had Sensible-Me scream at me, many times over the years, You don't know how to do this! You need to plan this out!

Sensible-Me didn't think to consider that not knowing how to write the books I was trying to write might mean that I also didn't know how to plan the books I was trying to write—but, then, Sensible-Me doesn't always think things through as often as he thinks he does.

Nonetheless, Sensible-You might need some scaffolding to feel secure enough to risk building your first few cathedrals. Sensible-Me certainly did. So, in that spirit, here are a couple forms of scaffolding that have proved quite useful to me at times when I was having trouble trusting the process.

The Elevator Pitch

The first one is the elevator pitch, so named because it's what producers use when caught in an elevator with a financier in order to try to interest that financier in the amazing new movie the producer wants to make.

For example, the elevator pitch for my novel Suave Rob's Double-X Derring-Do might be:

A far-future transsexual Evel Knievel tries to surf a supernova.

A similar pitch for Jurassic Park might be:

An amusement park kingpin uses cloned dinosaurs to create the ultimate tourist attraction.

Your elevator pitch is your one-sentence premise. Everything else about the story is optional. You hold on to the premise—the thing your story is about—and let everything else spin out of it as you explore it through all the tools in your writerly toolkit.

The Slug Line

Another screenwriting tool that I've found works great for scaffolding is called the slug line. This is the line in the film script that quickly sets the scene—Ext. Swamp, Day for example. I actually wound up liking this one so much I've used it as a narrative device in two of my long-running novel series. For example, in my mystery series, chapters are named for the time they start:

2:30 AM, Thursday

And in my science fiction family saga, I use a location/time/date stamp format:

"Luna City, Luna

0900 GMT

15 November, 2129"

This style choice not only helps me keep my timelines straight as I write, but in those two series it's genre-appropriate—being, as they are, tightly plotted, time-dependent thrillers and/or tales of intrigue, sometimes with multiple storylines—and it also does double-duty to goose the suspense and provide a ticking clock for the storylines. The advantages this technique offers for these books would be distractions in many of the other books I write, so in those books, I use more