NaNoWriMo Snacks: Dream Journaling for Busy People

The women in my writing group are all who I want to be when I grow up.

They dress appropriately for the weather. They cook and eat wholesome organic meals. They seem to understand that when going to writing group, it's generally useful to bring a writing utensil. They keep dream journals.

NaNoWriMo Snacks: More Lessons From Marina

I waxed all poetic about my love for Marina Abramovic's artist manifesto a couple of days ago.

Then I got sick. I'm still sick. I'm hungry. I'm cold. All I want to do is take a bath and watch Investigation Discovery shows, but I skipped yesterday's post, so here I am today. I'm not my best self, but I am here. Present.

Marina Abramovic's 2010 show consisted of her sitting for 16 hours in an Eames-inspired chair of glowing wood. Across from her sat another chair, also Eames-inspired, of equally glowing wood, and in that chair sat whoever wanted to, for as long as they wanted to. (Don't get me wrong. They filtered out the freaks. There was an aspiring performance artist that tried to take her clothes off before sitting down and the MoMa security guards put a stop to that real quick.)

NaNoWriMo Snacks: Gleanings From Marina Abramović

Performance artist Marina Abramovic has always fascinated me. I've never had the pleasure of viewing her work in person. (My New York life was far too crammed to get to the museums more than half an hour before closing, what with drinking to excess and loathing myself all the time.) What I know of her I know from various videos and interviews, and, most recently, the eponymous documentary chronicling her 2010 retrospective, The Artist is Present. 

What can a performance artist teach us about writing? More specifically, what the fuck can a performance artist teach us about surviving in the trenches of NaNoWriMo?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. Much like her work, Marina's manifesto is simple and radical. So much so, in fact, that I'm still mulling over the first precept.

NaNoWriMo Snacks: What To Do When You Want To Give Up

Crippling self-doubt seems to go part and parcel with NaNoWriMo.

The I'm not good enoughs have been plaguing me this week, and it sucks. There are a bevy of awesome pep talks by notable writers that you can read for encouragement, but sometimes these kind words cause insecurity to take a turn toward the bitter.

"Sure," we think, "easy for Aimee Bender to say. How nice for you, Dave Eggers! But I'm not good enough."

You know what? You're probably not. 

NaNoWriMo Snacks: What To Do When Caffeine Stops Working

NaNoWriMo is exhausting. So is daily life. When you combine the two, the product is generally a red-eyed, punch-drunk mess. Here are a few quick tips that will wake you up enough to keep slogging through those words without getting the shakes.

NaNoWriMo Snacks: What To Do When Depression Hits

I've struggled with depression on and off for most of my life. I know I'm not alone here- mental illness is part of the whole artistic temperament trope, and studies confirm that there's at least a kernel of truth to that idea. I'm not a tortured artist. I've sort of hovered at the precipice of tortured in the past, but these days my depression is irritatingly mundane. It's like an elderly version of Winston Churchill's black dog - relatively unobtrusive, but he pees on the carpet sometimes and I have to clean it up.

NaNoWriMo Snacks: Conspicuous Consumption

You know what drives me crazy?

Writers who don't read. I've talked to far too many of them. Their defense is usually something along the lines of not wanting to be "influenced" by other people's work. If this is truly a danger, I envy their impressionability. We should all be so easily influenced by Proust. 

Then there's a second camp of writers who love to read, but don't seem to extend that courtesy to other mediums. They don't visit museums, listen to music beyond the top 40, or watch independent movies.

Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.

NaNoWriMo Snacks: Self-Care

When you are a fire-bellied vortex of creativity, it's very easy to become so wrapped up in your project that you let pedestrian things like laundry, sleep, and your day job go to pot. I have this theory that my sink is participating in NaNoWriMo too, but instead of Scrivener or one of those other fancy programs, its chosen medium is mold.

This week we're going to be taking a look at some self-care issues, both stuff you're overindulging in and stuff you're neglecting. The goal is to keep yourself writing productively, but with clean hair, a full stomach, and minimal emotional turmoil.

I've found that my biggest distraction in this whole NaNoWriMo odyssey is not Facebook, or Twitter, or Cracked.

It's the NaNoWriMo forums. It is so much fun to read about other people's novels. It's fun to make writing buddies and work out plot structures together. It's fun to add to joke threads like "you know you're writing literary fiction when..." It's like Facebook, but with no pictures of babies or speculations about Obama's birth locale! The forums are very easy to justify It's the NaNoWriMo site, and I'm participating in NaNoWriMo. Therefore, it's a productive way to spend time.

Nope. Writing 50,000 words in forum posts does not a novel make. Here are a few tips to protect your time and still have fun.

NaNoWriMo Snacks: 4 Words We're All Probably Using Wrong

I initially skipped over the "Misused Words and Expressions" section of The Elements of Style, assuming that many of the definitions would be outdated. Language is a living thing, and as much I love Strunk and White,"bling" is in the dictionary now. I gave the section another glance last night, and was pleasantly surprised -there are actually some really blingy gems in there that still hold up. Here's the takeaway.

NaNoWriMo Snacks: Get Active

I am so tired today. I know that that's no way to open a blog post, but what's point of having my own little corner of the internet if I can't use it to whine about sleep deprivation?

I suppose the point is to write about writing while yawning and eating cheez-its, so today we'll continue our trek through The Elements of Style. You're probably just as tired as I am, so you'll be happy to learn that there's a way to be active without actually getting off your ass.

NaNoWriMo Snacks: The Power of Positive Prosing

I know NaNoWriMo can be a disheartening, soul-crushing vortex of self-doubt, so I thought today would be a good day to remind you to be positive.

Don't worry, I'm not going all self-help cult on you. We're just talking about making your sentences stronger (with a little help from the perennial classic The Elements of Style.)

NaNoWriMo Snacks: Now Fat-Free!

Last night, I was obsessed with earning the 5000 word badge on my NaNoWriMo dashboard. So obsessed, in fact, that I stayed up late writing drippy sentences that I subconsciously padded with words like "however" and "moreover."

Gross. And, moreover, so not productive.

Strunk and White, patron saints of elegant precision that they were, had something to say about striking these nothing words from your sentences. Here are some takeaways.

NaNoWriMo Snacks: Tricks From Strunk and White

I just ate a Baby Ruth bar for breakfast. Actually, that's a total lie. I just ate breakfast, and then ate a Baby Ruth bar. Snacks, especially sugary ones, are essential to the whole NaNoWriMo experience. Haven't you noticed that most traditional story arcs mimic a sugar high and subsequent crash?

Snacks are also the most practical option because they don't take much time to prepare, and we future NYT Notable Authors don't have time to be churning out three course meals right now. Kind of like how I don't have time to write long posts, and how you don't have time to read long posts, because we are (say it with me now) writing a novel.

For the month of November, I'm going to be whipping up snacks - little tidbits that will give you a bit more fuel for your daily 1,667 words. This week, we're going to be mining morsels from Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, an elegant little slip of a book about writing that's been considered an essential for decades. Here's a quick tip that helped me: