My Own WriMo

        July is my Wri Mo! Last blog post I talked about how I would wait until my birthday but I sorta jumped the gun and started ten days before that. Today is day four and I need to get my word count from 5,001 to 6,668. I love the momentum that's coming along with this.
      My story seriously has no plot so far but I can see it going pretty far. I want to keep this post short so I can get to writing. I just wanted to give ya'll an update on how this is going. Hard times ahead. See ya later

Old people are weird

      My grandmother is in town, she's like the cutest lady you'd ever meet. After dinner tonight she and my parents are sitting around their empty pie plates quizzing each other over US presidents. I swear the only time I've ever heard of some one quizzing each other is in books around the eighteenth century. I don't really know what that has to do with writing or reading, maybe it has to do with being young.

AntiProductive

Last week or so I was doing 2000 words a day like clock work. This week I've barely written 1000. Someone told me I'm probably burned out but honestly I'm just feeling lazy. It's not that I don't feel like writing it's just I'll do a review or read or something else instead of working on my word count. I think one major thing that's deterring me from writing is how I'm writing.
In my first manuscript I plotted like a freaking wedding planner or something. I knew how every little thing was going to go down and when I turned to write it I did it too short or something and I ended up with a manuscript with 25,000. This time I started plotting but got stuck so I just started writing, then my story and the characters seem to take a whole new life I hadn't planned. People don't like not knowing and I'm almost positive that's what's keeping me from my word goal. I'm scared to know what happens next. I know exactly how I want my ending to go I'm just not sure how I'm going to get there and that makes me worried if I'll end up in the right spot.

2,000

Every day for the past five days I've MADE myself write 2000 words toward my second manuscript, and to be honest it's really not that hard. I've found If I can make myself close out inkpop and not get up a thousand times I can pull it off all in about two hours. Normally it takes me three with a blog post, nap, and a few snacks between. Steven King says he writes 2000 but it's OK to start out a 1000 with a day of break. I say hecks naw! I'm jetting toward my ending with a get er' done attitude. This summer I plan of bumping my word count up but I'm not sure by how much. I think the first week of summer I'll try sitting down to write for as long as I can possibly take and just write then see how far I get, then average all those word counts together to make up my daily goal.

You're Gonna Laugh

So I've figured out a way to keep me writing when I don't feel like it. Me being a teenager I love the game The Sims 3. Recently I've been getting really bored with it so I haven't been playing much. So today decided to play, and one of my characters is a writer (Big shock there huh?) anyway. I made all his needs static so I don't have to worry about him leaving and sat him down at the computer to "work on Novel". So make that in a window, pull up Pandora, and start writing. Now every time I don't feel like writing I think Hey I'll just play Sims. Then I seen my sim is writing and I should be too. I know I know it's super lame but I'm willing to do what ever it takes to motivate myself.

Do me a favor and Shoot me every time I make a exceuse

This writing this is hard. I've edited my entry so many times I'm pretty sure I can recite the whole thing from memory and it's still no where near done. I haven't been working on my entry, or any writing in that case, sence editing and I'm worried I've lost my grove or something. People say our biggest cretic is ourselves but I don't think that's the case with me because I'm getting to a point where I just want to get the thing done with. I'd much rather work on my novel as a whole and develop plot and characters and all the spine stuff than actually writing. Conclusion: Planning and talking about writing is the easy part, actually sitting down and writing is a bitch. (Sorry it was needed). I need some motovation so hit me up on twitter @that_cool_girl or e-mail me at follow.the.journey.now@gmail.com

How becomming a Writer has Ruind my hope for Humaniy

If you're a writer you know all about the three act structure. Act 1: things start out normal. Then something happens giving your character a story goal(Disaster 1). Act 2: your character grows in skills and builds and burns relationships all the while in pursue of their story goal. Then something else happens. Something bad that completely changes how your character will reach their story goal(Disaster 2). Act 3: your character accepts the changes(or not) and learns grows, builds and destroys relationships, and works toward his story goal ether with a new approach or the same. Then something huge happens. Something that makes your character's story goal seem impossible(Disaster 3). Ending: your character comes up with a new way to reach story goal. He ether reaches it or he doesn't. The end.
Now you may be thinking. "what's so bad about that? Seems like a good story?" Well here's the answer. Every movie, fiction book, TV show, or short story is written with this three act structure in mind. By knowing this cookie cutter outline for stories absolutely kills things. I'll say I don't even watch movies anymore because I'm always thinking of the three disasters. This also kills my confidence in Imagination. Forget new and exciting! Here's something you should know: There are no new Ideas. Only recycled ones.
Here's another thing becoming a writer has killed for me: talking to people. Why? Because I've to to know people's motives for doing EVERYTHING. I watch my friends and some comments or actions just stick with me until I'm able to discover their unintentional motives. And here's what I've accumulated from this mountain of observations. 1) People Love themselves 2)People love other people Loving them and 3) Jealousy is every where.
How bout an example? My friend and I were discussing a Vocabulary quiz I had missed in English. She said "Me and Kyle studied them a little and they were really hard." Now I studied these words and they didn't seem any harder than usual. Then the question dawned on me. "Why would she have to mention Kyle?" Took me days to mull this over. It didn't seem like an important fact until I remembered I had told my friend I liked Kyle earlier that week. BOOM! Motives = power + Jealousy. I'm sure she wasn't sitting there thinking "Oh let's make Hannah-Beth feel jealous and make me look good!" but is shows a little glimpse of my friend's subconscious. I do need to remember to tell my friend I don't like Kyle anymore but that's unimportant. The point is we are selfish people. In my "Writing Fiction for Dummies" book I read that no character thinks they're minor characters. We're selfish people with a hunger for dominance over something- anything really. I guess that's what motivates writers to write. Writers get a chance to play god, decide what happens. Power thirst.
I've also started obsessing over universal truths. Universal truths are things that apply to everyone. From the queen of England to the 9/11 terrorists. There's a ton of them. Some deal with social interactions (ex. People would rather be asked than told) while some deal with peoples wants (ex. No matter what you do people will always ask for more) I was watching the cooking channel when I realized why there were so many shows about cooking and books on cooking and Italian people who love cooking. It's because EVERYBODY eats-or at least needs to. It's why people get so motivated to donate to feed the children. They couldn't imagine what it would be like to not have this thing they share with everybody. Eating. Now using these universal truths can throw a huge curve ball at your readers making them feel unified with people but these can also make your reader feel blurred and unimportant. Universal truths work well as themes for novels, but you should always keep them in mind when you're writing.
So there you have it. Humanity consists of a bunch of Self centered, power hungry, unimaginative, attention whores. But It's the people who are different who stand out from the crowd though.

Deadline

So I'm finally getting how people feel when they have an impossible dead line approaching. I've realized I barely have enough to enter my partial manuscript and my editing busiess is chaging my entire plot! I've been working a bunch on POV character and have considered revamping everything I have to a different POVcharacter. I really want to work with multipul POV characters during different scenes and my book(Writing Fiction for Dummies) doesn't go over that. I think they call that head hopping but I've read a bunch of stuff with what I"m talking about and it worked really well. My problem is the transitions from one scene to another with a differen POV character. Can anyone help?

I think with writing you can choose two of three things; A social life, A kick ass manuscript, or sleep. OK so I adapted that from an IB student joke but it still works. What sucks about being in High School is I've got to calculate GPA into that. It seems like there's just not enough time in the day to pull everything that needs to be done. One weekend I'm devoted to my writing and editing and another I'm hanging out with people I haven't talked to in weeks because I've been to busy writing. I've got to find some better ways to get bits of number one and three(Social life and Sleep) while holding onto a solid two (Manuscript).

On a side note: I've realized my blog posts have been about how to write and less about my journey as a Writer. I think I'll start refocusing my posts toward my journey more- although I will throw in some posts of things I've learned around the Blogsphere every now and then.

Writers Block and why it Sucks

Once you've got your usual routiene in order and you sit down to write almost religiously every day, the problem can be you don't know what to write. I hate it when you want to write but can't. Seems like you have tons of ideas when you have writers block it's just a bunch of bad ones. At one poing during one of my short stories about a girl working with the United States government on a top secrete mission I though it would be a good idea to make everybody Italian. Kid you not I completley finished my story before I realized this wouldn't work. After that when I tried going back and fixing it I still couldn't think of anything. I eventually scraped the whole project but it was a good learning experience. While you have writers block there are two important things to seeing through the hard times. One is keep writing. Oh it's going to be bad. I promise. But at least you will be able to go back later and learn from your mistakes and mabey even laugh about it later. Second is to keep Reading. Look for new styles, settings, and other aspects to short stories and books. When you can't figure how or what to write in your own style it's a good time to experiment with different styles. In the words of my favorite Science teacher. "Take chances, Make mistakes, and Get messy!"

How to get the most of your Writing time

So you've set up your four hour writing habit. Great! Now the problem is staying on task. Between Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Pandora, stumble upon, and youtube there's a mountian of things that can easily pull your attention from your work. With a few techniques you can maxamize your writing time and cut the distractions.

1) Log off Facebook. Facebook will be the death of productivity and Twitter goes right along with it. The best way to cut yourself off facebook during your writing time is to delete your facebook entirely but if don't have the will power for that it's ok to delete the bookmarks and short cuts to facebook and log out of it completley. It makes getting on your socoial networking sights seem like more work instead of just a click of a button

2) Don't even touch the internet! You can't get distracted from things if theres nothing there to distract you. Think of your computer used primaraley for writing and only get on the internet to look things up or if you have to. Consider using one computer for writing and another (mabey a public library one) for reading blogs and looking up things unrelated to your writing.

3) Set up a writing place. Everyone has a place they like to write. Mine is in my bedroom and I'll admit I'm kinda anal when it comes to my suroundings. My door must be closed. All the lights except a small lamp must be off. My bed has to bee made, and my Moleskin, G2 7pt. Black pen, notecards, and books must be close at hand. My family has gotten to where they don't even come in my room when the doors closed because they know I'll wine at them for disturbing my train of thought. Mean? Mabey but I get a bunch of work done.

4) Music Last time I had a whole post about Writing music. Set yourself up a playlist or pandora station that motivates you to write and kick starts your creative process. Pick a song to be your sort of Theme song. It'll tell your brain it's time to sit down and and write.

Hope I've helped you be more productive and focused. I love feed back, suggestions, thoughts or whatever so e-mail me at follow.the.journeynow@gmail.com.

Music for Writing

I've read that Stephen King listens to classic rock when writing. I tried and I swear all I could think about was living on a prayre! While I can't listen to old rock songs I've found listening to modern music like Katy Perry is just as worthless. "Not another teenage dream" and trust me there's enought of em on sites like Quizilla.I've a high criteria for my writing music; It must be emotoniall moving, it must be slightly dark, it must be mellow enough to become white noise, and I've got to learn the words. My playlist has been growing but I think I've found the PERFECT! writing album (for me at least) This is war by 30 Seconds to mars. The songs seem to tell the hero's journey in an this-affects-the-whole-community kinda way. The This is War album is awesom but one song imparticular, Hurricane. I love to darkness and mystery that goes with this song. It makes me think "Hey what would happen if I did this to my characters?" or "Wouldn't it suck if this happened?" I'll be posting my entire writing playlist soon. I'd love to know what you music you write to so leave a comment or email me at follow.the.journey.now@gmail.com. Keep writing and see ya soon:)

Useless thins I've started doing sence becomming a writer

Over the last month of 2010 I've noticed I've gained some rather intresting skills and habitsSence becomming a writer. Dare I say I've started a wild thing called Pen Spinning. It's really as easy as it sounds but I've taught myself some pretty impressive tricks while sitting there with a pen in my hand. It's kinda odd seeing hundreds of youtube videos of people spinning but they all are way better than me. Along with that I've noticed I can pretty much do anything with a pen in my hand.( I spent half of an Orchestra class doodeling in my music between playing)I've also taught myself to type with one hand. It's not easy on a qwerty keyboard but I refuse to go get one of those stupid onehanded keyboards. I don't nessicarlly use this when I'm writing so much as looking things up and IMing. Oddly I've noticed I've become much more organized sence becomming a writer. I'm not losing things as much although I did lose my flashdrive with all my writing on it onece and I seriousley cried. I've got to get my own computer to eliminate the threat of losing my work on a thing smaller than my ipod. Love to hear about your was of keeping up with your writings and I'd also love to read some example works but I can't say I'll be able to give much feedback. Shoot me an e-mail at follow.the.journey.now@gmail.com Till next time:)

Tools Every Writer Needs

Every writer has a tool box of things they use. Here are a few every writer should at least try out.
First is a moleskine. These notebooks are prefect for collecting ideas on the fly and just beg to be written in. There seems to be an entire community of artists and writers dedicated to the little things. They come in many sizes and even colors. I personally like a Large Plain Hard cover. It's big enough for me to actually keep up with but small enough to bring around with me. I'm also starting to like the Hard covered graphing paper kind but I haven't used it much yet.
The second tool is a Stumbleupon. It's a downloadable toolbar that feeds you new websites on subjects you pick with a click of a button. There's everything from teen life to Buddhism in the subjects but I keep my topics simple. Writing, Books, Clothing, and Health. This gizmo can be a little time sucking though. Just like Twitter you can easily lose a good hour or two of work time flipping through the almost endless pages of new things.
Third is a smart phone. I recently got mine and I've been able to link my face book with my Kindle and blogger. Things just seem to work better when they're all in sync. I have one app called Diaro. It's basically a Password protected diary. I keep little snippets of ideas and thoughts and pictures here and refer back to them when I'm at my computer. I like the password too so nosy friends don't have to see that I called their backpack a cat turd with straps.
Fourth is a Library card. If you don't have one of these you can never call yourself a writer. Free books on almost every subject for borrow. Oh did I mention they're FREE! Sure you've got to keep up with due dates but whats another date on a calender. If a book isn't in your local library they'll send it over from a different one or even buy if so you can borrow it.
The fifth tool is those 5X3 index cards. They're perfect for writing down your scene list. My current scene list is posted on about 70 5X3s cut in half (I guess that makes them 1.5X2.5 but what ever. You can change the order of things easily and without losing to much precious writing. (Imagine writing an entire scene just to throw it out in the second draft. Heart Breaking.) I keep my cards together with those silly Bandz all the little kids love. It keeps em together and in order.
The Sixth tool is a book. Writing Fiction for Dummies by Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy. My mom literally laughed at me when I made her buy this but I swear it's like my writer's bible. Everybody has something to learn from going over the basics again even if you're the best writer in the world. This covers everything from character development to plot structure a definite must read for writers of all Genres.
I hope this list has been helpful and that you've picked up a few new tools and things to try out with your writing. Shoot me an E-mail at follow.the.journey.now@gmail.com with tips, ideas, feedback or what ever. Till Next time:)

Alliance for Young Artists and Writers Contest!

So there's this huge thing called the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers and every year they have a bunch of different categories for kids. Well whodda thunk they've got a Novel Writing category?!?! I have to turn in between 13 and 50 pages and a one page novel outline to some place in New York by FEB 25. I've got my outline but It's about 12 pages and I'm at 27 pages (11,000 words) so if I slim down my outline I could technically submit my 27 pages but why not throw in the other 23 pages. First place gets to talk with a professional editor about publishing and a butt load of scholarship money. Do I hear a challenge?