 I have this favorite quote of mine. I think when I talk to people about nanorhymo and invite them to do National Malibu Writing Month, I hear the two most often excuses that I hear is people say I don't have the time to write a novel in a month and we're gonna talk about that today too. Or they'll say, and this is like what I find more disturbing, they'll say, oh, I'm not a creative type. And I happen to believe that we are creative types by definition, being a human being is being a creative type. And I love this quote from Pablo Picasso. And I think about it a lot because it's easy to lose yourself in adulthood. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. You know, when we get to be adults, everything's about practicality and, you know, I don't know, money bills, things like that. And I think it's easy to trivialize those creative aspects of our lives and not value them as highly as we should. And so I hope you leave this session tonight like empowered to write your story and to make it a priority. Cause the danger is, as Mary Oliver said, the most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work and who felt their own creative power restive and uprising and gave to it neither power nor time. Sometimes when I do these classes I have people write down, this is something you can do outside of this session, but to really think about why you write and why it's important to you. Because in those moments where you're facing the pain of writing a novel and finishing it, as you told me, or when you wake up in fear or self-doubt, remembering that why is really important. And I think the why for most writers is not to become a best seller. That's a nice end to things, but it's really to get the story down on the page. That's what's gratifying and makes it a gift. So I think one thing here is I wanna mention is this chasm between ourselves and our favorite writers. I think so often people say I'm not a real writer because I'm not published, or other people write books, not me. And I certainly went through this myself. I grew up in this small town in Iowa where no one was a writer. I'd never met a writer before. And then when I went to college or moved to San Francisco, I would occasionally meet people who'd published books, but they were just kind of these other people who had pedigrees and qualifications. And so I didn't think that I could necessarily be a writer because that was something that other people do. And I always liked this quote from my Angelo. I'm still amazed by it or intrigued by it. She said, I have written 11 books, but each time I think, uh-oh, they're gonna find me out. Now I've run a game on everybody and they're going to find me out. And here she was one of the most celebrated before she died, one of the most celebrated in American authors. And she read like a poem at Barack Obama's inauguration. She's super important, super accomplished, but she can still, we all have this, writers especially I think, have a certain anguish and self-doubt that can lead them to think that they're not legitimate. They're not real. And I think part of it is also that writers face so much rejection. It's part of being a writer. Either you're rejecting your own words, as you were saying earlier. They didn't look good once you read them. Or you're rejected by a publisher you're submitting to. Or you might even feel a sense of rejection when you're showing your work or sharing it with friends and family. So it's a big task and I think you've gotta like, just remember that so many people, even people like Maya Angelou, wrestle with that self-doubt. But I think, do people know what the imposter syndrome is? You feel like a phony among those people who are real somebodies. And I think a lot of authors feel this before they get published. And let me tell you, you think publishing will solve all of these problems? It doesn't. You still have the same self-doubt and possibly imposterism after you're published, just like Maya Angelou did. And I think authors, as I said, are especially susceptible to this because a lot of writing is facing rejection and overcoming it. But the one thing I think is like, the worst thing about imposter syndrome is that I think it relates to fear as you were talking about it. It stands between you and the page in a way that you're not gonna do your best writing. So I think the best writing comes from being brave and from being vulnerable. And if you feel like you're an other person, somebody who's not entitled or doesn't have the certificate to be a writer, you're not gonna be as naturally brave on the page. So for me, there's one definition of writer. It's not somebody who's published. A real writer is somebody who sits down and writes every day, who takes responsibility, as you put it, for writing. So if you doubt yourself at all, tell yourself you're a writer just because you write. And here's another good thing. If you don't feel like you've got the pedigree or haven't taken classes or training in being a writer, don't worry about it. The less you know about a field, the better your odds, Jerry Seinfeld said. Dumb boldness is the best way to approach a new challenge. A lot of people, when they start something, you learn by doing. Like you can't learn to write a novel. You learn it by writing a novel. You can take an infinite number of classes about how to write a novel and you won't learn it until you do it. So trust in that. So I want to address a little bit that chasm between inspiration and responsibility. I think inspiration's a funny thing because a lot of writers I talk to, they wait for those, what I call the big thunderbolts of inspiration. Do people know what I'm talking about there? It's like that kind of inspiration that it does feel divine. It's a really rare kind of moment where you're in the shower and you get this glorious idea, right? And it happens to me about twice a year. So I feel like if I wait for that inspiration, I'll never take the responsibilities you put it and sit down and write. It's funny because I think we have this concept of the muse and it comes from, it actually does come from a divine source. This comes from like, I think 1300, the etymology is that inspiration's given to you. It's something that comes from the heavens and just kind of like magically appears to you. And the old French said it was like inhaling air, like you're breathing in something from the world. And I like that definition a little bit better because you're breathing in, bringing something in and changing it within your being. But I think a lot of people get hung up on this notion. The Greeks, there were like nine Greek goddesses who they called the muses. And again, the author here, this is a Rembrandt painting, the muse whispers it in the author. So the author is receiving things. It's kind of like you're lucky to get this story. You're lucky to find inspiration. It's good fortune. But I think like those big moments in inspiration are so rare, you're not gonna finish a book waiting for those. And so inspiration, writing a book is all about, not the big eye of inspiration, but the little eye of inspiration. And the little eye of inspiration, I think you create yourself by sitting down and writing every day. And it's like the shuffle of words on the page and your involvement in the materials of the world. Words, I feel like I think about it as these magical sprites are popping out and helping you write the story and helping you create that momentum. It was a great quote from Toni Morrison. A writer is either compelled to write or not. If I waited for inspiration, I wouldn't be a writer. So one way at Nana Raimo, that we try to ignite that type of inspiration that guides a novel every day, is through this framework of a goal and a deadline, which we think equals creative magic. And the goal and deadline that we use for National Novel Writing Month is 50,000 words in 30 days. You can modify this goal for any type of writing project you're doing. For instance, National Poetry Month this year, I'm writing one poem per day for the month of April. And so yeah, but the main thing is that this goal and deadline, it helps you from waiting for those big moments of inspiration and sitting down every day and taking responsibility. So I think when we talk about writing a book, goal and deadline are rarely mentioned. We talk about elements of craft and how to write suspense and how to write a great plot or great characters. But none of that happens if you don't develop the discipline. And I think with a goal and a deadline it helps you create that. Joyce Carol Oates said, getting the first draft of a book novel finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor. I think this gets to what you were talking about when you mentioned the kind of pain of writing a novel. It's tough. Every time I write a novel, even though I've written them before, I'm amazed at how tough it is. And I have deeper and deeper respect for those people who can even finish one rough draft, let alone revise it and publish it. But the NaNoWriMo experience doing a novel in a month that helps you push that, pushing a peanut across a floor is an unpleasant thing. So why not get it across the floor as fast as possible? And that's why we say, write a novel and write 50,000 words in 30 days. It doesn't matter what you write. You've just got to get that peanut across the floor. And then you can clean up those words and revise them later. So before I did NaNoWriMo, for instance, the first year I did it, I'd been writing for a long time. But the way I found that I wrote is that I wrote with this kind of ponderous preciousness as I call it. Like I would write the first sentence or the first paragraph over and over and over again until I got it perfect. And then I'd move on. And I'd like perfect the first chapter. And I wouldn't move on until I had that perfect first chapter. And the thing that I didn't realize is that I was spending, a lot of novels have like three acts in them. And so I was probably spending about 60% of my writing time on the first act, 25% on the second act and 15% on the end. So it's a very inefficient way to write a whole novel. My novel would start out good and then just get worse and worse as you read it. But I think like the constraints, like constraints are, is a word with a negative connotation. Every writer I know wants more time. They don't want constraints. They want, they don't want jobs. They want plenty of money so they can sit and write and focus on their novels and bring them to fruition. But constraints, if the first bullet point was here, it takes away, like it restricts you in a way that it makes you make choices. So the reason the goal in the deadline works with Downerima, one reason for me is that I know I've only, I need two to three hours a day to write the 1700 words to help me get to 50,000 words. So I have to cut things out of my life. So I might have to give up social media for a month. I might have to give up Netflix for a month. I might have to wake up earlier for a month. But that constraint helps me make those choices and prioritize my creativity. And I've noticed something is that sometimes when people have expanses of time, they actually don't use it as well. And so I have this premise that how many people, how many people here are busy people? Everybody raised their hand, right? We're all busy people. Busyness is like part perception and part reality. But I think we all have more time in our lives that we can find, especially with the goal in the deadline we'll bring it out. In fact, Ray Bradbury, I love this story, he wrote Fahrenheit 451 on his lunch breaks during his job. So he had a half an hour and he used that half hour and you had to like buy time at UCLA to use the library to use their typewriters. So instead of getting on the computer here, you'd put in a quarter and so he would maximize his time and type as fast as he could for that half hour, just in a burst. So if anyone has lunch breaks that lend itself to writing, you can put in a half hour a day. That's probably about 300, 500 words you could write easily during that break. And I think like constraints keep perfectionism from nailing away at you. If you know you have to write 1700 words a day for NaNoWriMo, you're not gonna let that perfectionism hold you back. I mean, part of the thing is getting over it because you're focused on the forward progress of your writing. For a rough draft, I think one, like liberating yourself from that sense of perfectionism or that's gonna be good helps you write in those moments that I say are, I don't know, less inspiring, I guess. And I'll just tell this, I can't remember where I have the story of my slides but I'll tell it now, it's one of the most inspiring stories I have is that Toni Morrison, before she was a published novelist, she wrote her first novel and she was a single mom in New York City with I think two kids and so she was very busy, very constrained. So after working a long, hard day, she came home, she took care of her kids, she got them to bed and she had about 15 minutes before she needed to go to bed and so those were, just think that has to be the worst 15 minutes for creativity of the day for her but that's how she wrote her first novel. She said I'm gonna write, that's the only time I have and I'm just gonna write for 15 minutes a day and the reason I like that story is it shows, one, how we can find time in our busy lives to write but two, how big things are created with small increments. It's just like putting one pebble on the pile of rocks every day and it does build into something. So again, I think this is later on in the presentation but I'll just mention it now. Like think about it, if you write 250 words a day which for me might take, I don't know, let's say 15 minutes, half an hour even if I'm writing really slowly. I know some people who do like in two or three minutes though but 250 words a day for 30 days is 7,500 words in a month. So you write 7,500 words in a month that is 90,000 words in a year and that's a big, this is not even 90,000 words. So there's a novel. You can write a draft of a novel in 15 minutes a day and so I think like sometimes as writers we don't do the math and this is like where the golden deadline come in and I want you to do an exercise later on where you'll go on a time hunt in your life and you'll figure out how much time do I have? How many words can I write in that time? Whether it's 30 minutes at a lunch break or 15 minutes before bed or I'm a morning person so I try to wake up an hour before my kids do to write. So I think it's like as writers we need to really think how to strategically approach our time and use it for our creativity. Because these days it's just so easy to doddle it away, right? I mean like if you, I mean these devices have killed many a novel, right? I think I go well I'll just say this that because I was wearing a Fitbit earlier and a Fitbit is like if people know what a Fitbit is it like tracks your steps so the goal is for me at least 10,000 steps a day. So one thing I like about having that goal in a deadline is that sometimes I'll come home and I'll check my progress and I will have, I thought I'll think I'm near 10,000 steps but I'll be at 6,000 steps. And so it prods me to go out and walk those next 4,000 steps before going to bed kind of like Toni Morrison. And I think that can work for your writing too because like on the Nanorama website we have like word count tracking graphs. So you're entering your word count every day and seeing how far below or above your word count you are. So you'll know like if you have a goal of 1,000 words a day and a year at 600 you'll use that 15 minutes before bed to try to get those next 400 words. It's a great motivator. The reason I stick up for routine is kind of for this main point is that you're clicking on because you have to because you're sitting there. A lot of writers say even if you don't have any, if you really feel like writer's block you mentioned like I forget which writer said this but he says even when he's blocked he makes himself sit at the desk through his whole whatever it is, two or three hours. And usually by just sitting there something happens. It might take 15 minutes but something happens. Something clicks on. And the writer I was gonna reference here is Stephen King. Has people read his book on writing? I feel like it's one of the best books on writing. And what he says, he says that having a writing routine is sort of like having a sleep routine. You go into, at least if you have a house as big as he does, I don't. But you go into, you have your office, right? You have your room. You have your desk. You have whatever it is, wherever it is you write. And it's kind of like when you go in your bedroom. Your mind is switching into sleep mode when you go into your bedroom. You might have a routine whether you've planted out or not where you start reading a book and that helps make you sleepy. And he says the same thing about sitting in a certain place every day is that when you sit down to write things are happening mysterious in your brain. Your brain is getting ready and primed to bring out a story. And so that's why I think a routine is really important. And working with that goal and deadline approach helps you develop that routine because you gotta show up every day to hit your word counts. So we're gonna go five steps to make your goals work for you and then we're gonna do a little exercise with time hunt. But the main way, one of the first reasons people don't succeed in nanorimos is that they don't strategize how they're gonna use their time for a month or how to find the time rather. And that's where the time hunt comes in. And we're gonna do this a little bit later but what you do is you detail a typical day and you go through it like I'll write down, I do this every year in 15 minutes increments how you spend your time. And they have apps for this too so you can use apps to get even more precise or to find out how you're spending your time online. But I have this premise that most people can find either that 15 minutes that Toni Morrison found or two or three hours which is what I need to do nanorimo. And then what you do is once you find that like, whatever, hour block or something, you think about how many words can you write in an hour. So let's say you can write 500 words. Let's say you made a goal that you wanna write a novella that's 30,000 words long and you've gotta find the time to do that. So if you can find an hour in your day and if you can write 500 words a day then look out into the calendar and see how long it's gonna take and then I can't do the math in my head, I'm sorry. But it's one way to, it helps you be accountable, it helps you develop the routine. In nanorimo we find that the people, like there's a drop off after the third or fourth day where people will miss their word count targets for a couple days. So they might be like a thousand words behind and then they'll quit entirely. And so with any, especially when you're writing a book or a novel, don't let those lapses derail you. Either reset your goals or find a way to catch up with those thousand words. And then we find with nanorimo announcing your goal and deadline to the world, like the best way to quit smoking is to tell people that you're quitting smoking because then they're gonna hold you accountable or even if they're not holding you accountable you'll feel their eyes on you. So we advise people to announce on Facebook or to tell your friends individually, I'm writing a novel, I wanna write a novel this year, I wanna finish it. Just by voicing that and telling people you'll have a built-in system of accountability. And you'll get to this state, Dorothy Parker. You might hate writing. She said, I hate writing, I like having written. I think a lot of us sometimes don't like that first moment at 5 a.m. But I'm an early morning writer too but by 6 a.m. when I'm done I'm so glad I did it. Yeah. So let's set some, how many people, do you wanna set some writing goals for this year or for this month? Okay, let's do the exercise that I did. Let's take five minutes and real quickly, I'll just keep a time here. Map out a typical day. Just think about where you don't have to do the whole time hunt with 15 minutes increments but try to map out how you spend your time now and where there are pockets of time that you think you can write. This will be the most valuable tool you have as a writer for the rest of your life, I promise you. And if you've figured out how much time you have to write, think about just word count. How fast are writers are you? How many words can you write in say an hour or a half hour? One person is writing so make sure we have time for everything. Are people done? Yeah, good. How much time did people find? Did anyone find 15 minutes in a day? Yeah, half hour? Hour? How many words, for those of you who did an hour, how many words do you think you can do in an hour? Before people do, we advise our young writers program students to actually do it for an hour and see. I don't know if a lot of people know that. I can write about a thousand words in an hour. And I'm mainly talking about a rough draft generator right now and this is kind of using that nano-rimo principle of writing faster rather than slower. And there are creative benefits to that too. I mean one creative benefit besides getting the novel done is that I think by writing in a more improvisational style you're allowing those ideas to get out. You're restricting, you're getting rid of your inner editor, which we're gonna talk a little bit about as well. I guess this is a hard exercise to do here. Normally if I had more time I'd flush it out and have you actually write for five or 10 minutes and see what that was like and then use the tally. The main thing I think is to set up a reasonable goal and then think about finding those pockets in your life where you can write a certain amount of words. And obviously they're good days and bad days. Some days the writing's flowing and you write 2,000 words in an hour and sometimes you can only write 300. But the main thing is to hold yourself accountable and also find that time in your life to prioritize and to do it. So I definitely wanna emphasize that. Do people know what an inner editor is? I just mentioned it. Yeah. I think the inner editor can take a lot of forms. You said that it was like a lot about like editing your words so that you're. There's also questioning and delving myself. Exactly, I think it's so easy. One of the tough parts of finishing a novel is getting over those moments of self-doubt when you're hearing that voice telling you you're not a real writer or this isn't, this prose isn't sparkling or this story doesn't have suspense, whatever it is. I think it's almost impossible not to have that voice and so the challenge is like how do you deal with that voice when it comes into your head? For me it's like yeah, I wrote down a few things. It tends to be a demanding figure who tells you you're doing it all wrong, right? Like what do you know about a novel? How do you know how to write one? Sometimes I think it's like, and it's not offering any constructive advice either. It's just an essay. For me it compares like your prose to others and shows you how they did it but with the purpose of kind of belittling you. And this is where I think sometimes when I write a rough draft is so far away from my favorite author's rough drafts or even from my best drafts or finished products rather. So I would love it if we could all see our favorite author's rough drafts instead of their final products because I think it would be an amazing learning experience. I bet we'd have epiphanies because I have this theory that no matter how good a writer's they are their rough drafts are crappied by definition too. They're very similar to ours. And the only reason they got a lot better is because they've either practiced a lot or they've revised a lot and they've had help from their editors. We don't see that finished novel everything that went into it. So that's why we say banish your internet editor and you'll be able to write more and write better. The other thing here, the third bullet point here it's a basically collection of all your fears and insecurities of the writer which is what you mentioned earlier. Does anyone know, do you know the term creativity wound? Have people heard that or creativity scar? I think we all have in some way it's when somebody in your life has told you something hurtful about a creative project you've done. So a lot of kids will get it like an art class for instance if they're or they'll feel it. They say that there's a there's a point where kids stop being artistic or a lot of kids do. It's their brain develops to the point that when like they draw a tree if it doesn't look exactly like the tree they're drawing they see that gap between their sketch and the actual tree and they'll tell themselves I'm not an artist. But usually it happens when somebody else is like told you and so like when I got my MFA at San Francisco State I stayed an extra semester just so I could take a class with this famous author who I liked. This is a dangerous thing to do as a writer because oftentimes famous authors don't really want to be teachers. But she just eviscerated my writing. She said things that were, like she wrote no shit in the margins, things like that. Things that were obviously not had no intent of helpfulness and it was deeply wounding. It was the only time in my life where I just could not get off the couch to write. I just totally shut down creatively. And then later on I found out that she dealt with everybody in the class like that. And that helped a little bit but hearing somebody's negative words when they're really hurtful about your creativity it's like a mulch where your inner editor grows up into a dragon essentially. So we all have, I think most writers unfortunately go through that experience to some degree. But we have in our Young Writers Program we tell the young writers to draw their inner editor before writing a novel. And so this is a drawing from this boy Graham. And the thing I like about it is he's drawn all these arms and legs. And so your inner editor can attack you from multiple angles, multiple sides, even with different objects. Like he's got the dictionary in one hand and a racer in the other hand. And so yeah, and then we tell them wad it up and throw the inner editor away. You know, the concept of the inner, I mean I agree banished the inner editor in the rough draft but also learn how to deal with that inner editor, that inner naysaying voice. And this comes from Bernay Brown, recognize the difference between perfectionism and healthy striving. She defines perfectionism as when you're doing something for other people's judgment. So I sometimes think about when I have guests come over to my house how I kind of fearfully clean because I don't want them to see what a messy person I actually am. But healthy striving would be more where I'm just looking at my prose and my writing and trying to make it better for myself, trying to make it match my vision, not writing it for somebody else. Because when you're doing something with a perfectionist's tendency you're doing it, there's an element of fear there. I advise people to sit down and really decide on a strategy for your inner editor, which is really like when are you gonna be more welcoming to those voices, especially those voices who are gonna help you make a better sentence? You know there's a time and place for that in revision. And then I also think your inner editor needs to know that sometimes you just need to be liberated entirely. There's a time to chase wild ideas over hills and dales of your imaginations and then there's a time to refine things. And so you just have to define when is that inner editor welcome and when is that inner editor need to leave the room. So you mentioned writer, who mentioned writer's block? You did, yeah. So let's talk about, I don't believe in writer's block. And the reason I don't believe in writer's block, I think a lot of writers kind of well fetishize it, kind of celebrate it in a way, even by announcing it and saying it's there, you're putting a block between your ideas and words on the page. And I think there are easy ways to get over it. And I'm gonna mention that. I'm gonna talk about some of those techniques. Ray Bradbury, when he first became a writer, he, to discover his stories, he wrote down a list of 20 nouns, just random nouns that came into his mind. And then from that 20, list of 20 nouns, he would write little tiny essays, like he wrote 100 or 200 words, but you wouldn't even have to write that many. And then he would like look at all those essays or those little tiny snippets and that's how he discovered some of his initial stories. Like it was all about these things really coming out of his subconscious. And that's the way he wrote the book. A Wicked Way, what's the title? Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Something Wicked This Way Comes, there it is. You get the prize. So yeah, so that's just an example of how he's creating something from the mulch of his subconscious. And he might have had writer's block, but just by that act of writing and exploring his mind, a story sprouts up, it's magical. Oftentimes, like when I'm staring at my laptop in that moment at 5 a.m. where I don't think words are gonna come, I do what I call write outside this story. So that means either sitting down and not writing on my laptop, just putting words on a page. There's something about that tactile sensation and that more slow pace that sometimes brings something out. Sometimes I'll go right in a different spot, like not in my room, maybe in a cafe, just someplace different because different environments spur different thoughts. I also become a big fan of writing prompts. And so like my side life to NaNoWriMo is I run this literary magazine called Hundred Word Story. And each month we put up one photo and we invite people to write a story about that photo. And so I have this dream of planning out a whole novel with a photo or a writing prompt at the beginning of every chapter. And that would be like something to write to and to spur thoughts. But they don't have to be pictures, they can be, they're whole books of writing prompts that you can buy, you can Google things on the internet or Google writing prompts on the internet and get great ones. And the reason I mention this is because we have this NaNoWriMo tradition of doing what we call word sprints. Has anyone participated in a word sprint before? Yeah? So- Pretty much a free write. The thing is like it is that concept again of banishing the internet editor and just write. And just write anything that comes to your mind. Don't worry about punctuation, just write. And the amazing thing about it is, and this gets to the magic of creativity, is that I have led, you guys, I hope you guys won't disprove this because I've said it so many times. I've led hundreds of word sprints. I've given a simple prompt. I've never seen anyone not be able to write. Usually people have written at minimum 50 or 100 words. Sometimes if they're on laptops as many as 500 words. So we're gonna do it today. And I hope that no one has writer's block. But this is something that you can do yourself at home or at NaNoWriMo like we have a whole Twitter account dedicated to at NaNoWord Sprints. And so during NaNoWriMo, there are word sprint people operating that 24 hours a day. And if you go to our write-ins, that's how like something like this, we would be giving like word sprints for you guys to help get your words on the page. So this is like just, and to you said improv. I think they do have a very improvisational writing structure. Like improv is all about saying yes and when you're on stage. So if the actor does something, you're receiving that and building on it. You're not saying no. So you go with it. As Tina Fey says, you can't be that kid standing at the top of the water slide overthinking about it. You have to go down the chute. So get your improv muscles going. And then I think like also like, don't get hung up on any sort of messiness. Karen Russell, she has this great quote. I definitely think that if you can make peace with the fact that you will likely have to throw out 90% of your first draft that you can relax and almost even enjoy writing badly. And that's because the first draft, the writing badly is about experimentation. That's where you're gonna find your story. And she's right. Every writer I've talked to, 90% of that first draft gets cut. It's necessary to write it, but a lot of it's gonna go away. So let's do a writing sprint. Are people game to do one, try and run? Good. So the object is to write for five minutes. I'm gonna give a prompt. Write as fast as you can and see how many words you can write. Write for quantity, not quality. We have a saying that quantity can produce quality if you let yourself go. So here's the prompt. It is we smelled the smoke before we saw the flames. Okay, time. The next part of this is can you, that's a little bit, usually when people have laptops, of course it's easy to get a word count. Can you estimate how many words you wrote? And the way to do that is to write, count the words on any given line and then multiply it by how many lines you wrote. So two things. I don't know. This is why I don't believe in writer's block. Because that was just a random prompt, right? It just dropped. And you guys all, what was your experience like? Did you actually write, end up writing a story? Yeah. Like a story formed out of those simple words that you didn't know anything about and just impromptu. Just in real time, you came up with something, right? Like that's just the magic of creativity in your brain. You just have to open up the pathway a little bit and things come out. And I don't mean to diminish writer's block, by the way, because I know it's a very real thing to some people that I know, especially if you are depressed or have trauma, you know? It's like it's really hard to write and find a way to write through that. I just give this exercise as a way to, you can do this yourself any moment you feel blocked in order to push your story forward. You can use your own prompts or join an Anorimo group like I mentioned. Well, I'd initially planned for just an hour of material there. Do you guys wanna like stop and take questions? This next section I put in there in case I had more time and it's talking about planning a novel versus pantsing a novel, which is writing by the CD repants in Anorimo or something in between. I found in Anorimo, we have this discussion or this kind of ongoing debate about whether you should plan which means meticulously outline your novel ahead of time or whether you should just show up and write it and there are benefits to each that I'm gonna touch on. There are hazards to each too. Like I think one thing, like I view it like it's kind of like travel. I don't know if you guys are planners. You can think about how you plan in the rest of your life. If you're a planner in the rest of your life, you're like most likely gonna wanna plan your novel. But like if I was gonna go to Paris and I was a planner, you'd probably know these types of people. They'll read all the travel books ahead of time. They'll know all the restaurants in the neighborhoods and the museums they wanna go to. They'll plan out a whole itinerary. And the benefit of this is that when they go to Paris for those two weeks, they see and do everything. They wanted to do, because they've got it on a time grid. Whereas if you're pantsing, you kind of just show up. You show up, you check into your hotel or you find a hotel once you get there and you kind of just open yourself up to the streets of Paris. And you might know that the Louvre is a museum and you wanna end up that. But you might not see as many things but you might find those strange and interesting experiences that a planner might not find, for instance. And that's the way I at least kind of think about it. So I think there are benefits to planning. I think it gives you a sense of control. Like you, in planning I'm thinking of, there are a lot of different ways to go about it but just like an outline. An outline that goes through every section of your novel, every chapter, every scene in the chapter. So you can get this whole kind of map of what's ahead. One benefit of planning is that once you have that whole map and outline, you know the ending. So all of your writing, you can think about foreshadowing, how to build suspense, how you're gonna pace things once you know the ending, it can help with that. It can give you less chance of writer's block because if you have an outline, you know where the story's going. So when you wake up at five in the morning, you know, okay, there's this chapter to write. I've got it planned out. And there's less chance of going wildly astray which for me, it's a hazard of writing a novel. Like I love putting flashbacks in novel. I love putting backstories in novels. And not that that's bad, but it can be very kind of inefficient and I'll follow a little tangents in a lot of different directions. Most likely a lot of those might get cut. Sometimes though they lead to great things. I think sometimes one benefit of planning is like when you have the outline, you can spot problem areas. Like you can get a sense of that trajectory of escalation in your writing and be like okay, you know, halfway through the second act, there's a problem there. There's not enough conflict. There's not enough rising action. So it can be an efficient way to write. R.L. Stein, a guy who's sold about a billion children's horror books. He said, no one likes to outline. I'm not sure about that. I noticed people who loved to outline. But I can't work without one. He says, I think that's one reason I'm so prolific. I take a week and I plan everything. I do all the thinking beforehand. And so he just needs that to feel creatively secure. He needs that to kind of have that roadmap and write to that. He's also really prolific. On the other hand, Stephen King, who's equally as prolific doesn't plan his novels. He wakes up and just pantses them. So it's not like there's one approach that works. I think you have to find the approach that works for you. Benefits of pantsing. I think for me, when I outline my whole novel, it starts to feel like a business plan and not a journey. And I happen to think that writing is a journey and that there's magic in that journey. And so I feel like my outlining puts kind of like a corners me sometimes into the structure that I predetermined that I'm not writing freely. With an outline, I think you can become a translator instead of a writer. I think again of that travel metaphor. Where I'll get a map of the city and if I'm wandering around the city, what I find I do is I'm looking at the map more than I'm looking at the city. And to make that analogy into writing, if I have an outline, I'm looking so much at the outline that I'm putting blinders on. I'm not looking at the wider story and all those possibilities. So some of those tangents I was mentioning earlier that I love to follow. The reason I love to follow them is because they lead to unknown places. And I think a lot of stories are the best when you've taken those wild leaps of experiments. Yeah, so pantsing opens you up to kind of creative experimentation and allows you to take risks. And planning also, I know a lot of planners who as opposed to Aralstein, they love planning so much that they are always planning novels. They're always researching novels, but they're not writing novels. And so I think people planning can become an excuse not to write. And there's this term in NaNoWriMo where we call, people identify as planners or plotters or panzers. I identify as a plancer. So I'm somewhere in the middle. And I like to know a little bit of the direction of the story, but I don't like a determinant in an outline. I still like to explore. But I do, I will write little sketches, little chapter synopses and just the vaguest kind of sketchiest outline. So I'm sort of somewhere in between. And my method of planning is really the month before NaNoWriMo during October. I just take a lot of little notes. I'm always carrying a moleskin journal with me. And when I get thoughts on the way to work, this is again a way to use your time. Like if I get thoughts after I've taken my kids to school, I pull up to work and I spend five minutes just jotting down those notes, and then I type them in later. Every writer is constantly, I need to experiment with the process, I think. And for me, like I told you before, I was this ponderous, precious writer. And the reason I did NaNoWriMo was to shake up my creative routine and my creative process and just to write faster instead of slower. Just think things like that. And so I always advise people, I don't know, we all have our proclivities and it's good to honor those proclivities and those strengths. And once you find a way, that's great. But I still think, every time I start a novel, I try to do one thing differently. And I still think if you're a pancer, try plotting and planning your novel once. If you're a planner, try panting at once. They're just good creative skills to have. And outlining, I didn't mention this, but outlining can be a very creative act into itself. It's kind of like a big brainstorm of a novel. Let me see what else I get here. So yeah, this is Chang Ray Lee. This speaks to kind of more of the panting approach, but he says, part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. It's like spelunking. You kind of create the right path for yourself, but boy, there are so many points at which you think, absolutely, I'm going down the wrong hole here. And I think even if you're outlining, as a writer, you are going to go down the wrong hole sometimes, but you have to go down the wrong holes to find the right holes. And you'll find those right holes later, probably in revision. So just gotta jump in. Are people familiar with this diagram? Well, I've got mixed feelings about this to tell you the truth. So it's the three act structure. You have a beginning and inciting incidents. Character has a desire and then there's conflict and then the action rises up until this climax and then there's this descending action. It's like a roller coaster, essentially. You're going up slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. It's all full of suspense. You get to the climax, you're about to die and then you kind of coast in. The reason I don't like it is because I guess I'm just not, I talked to a lot of people who struggle with plot and I struggle with plot and this has never helped me plot my novel. I guess it kind of does a little bit, that roller coaster ride. But when people talk about planning and structuring their novels, I actually think that you can keep this in mind and then do other exercises that you layer on top of it. So this is one of my favorites, is that you break your story structure up into three sentences of three words each. And so this maybe works a lot better for a fairy tale like Cinderella, but it's like Cinderella can't go, right? She can't go to the ball. She goes anyway, that's act two and act three, she gets the prince. Of course there are things in between those, but the reason I put this here is that you could, I think, take a novel idea that you're doing and do the same thing with it. Try to summarize the first act, the second act and the third act in just three words and three sentences and then you'll have a beginning, middle and end. So I just want to mention a couple exercises like that. This is my favorite exercise though. Novel writing is essentially, or storytelling, is just an exercise in what if. What if I was late coming tonight? What if I talked to a certain person on Bart and what I mean, one what if leads to another what if, so you go into a scene or a situation and usually you're changed by that and that creates another what if. So I think a novel is just built on hundreds of what ifs and so I advise people like when you're at the beginning, like one planning exercise is just to put what if at the top of a page and just do one big brainstorm. Write what if and write 100 different scenarios. You don't have to use them all. It's mainly just an improvisational exercise to help you conceive of the novel. So yeah, what if somebody gets fired? What if a marriage or relationship implodes? What if somebody gets a disease? Just put in those wild things into the novel and Nabokov has this great quote where he says he treats his characters like galley slaves which is what he means that he, a lot of writers can be too nice to their characters. Like conflict is what drives a plot. So in some ways Nabokov is saying like be mean to your characters like readers are reading for conflict. So get the conflict in there sooner rather than later and then have the characters grow, develop and react to that conflict. And just go to go back here to the three act structure. So what I did is like after that game of what if I'm planning a novel instead of doing an outline, I'll write all those what if scenarios on little post-its and I'll put them on the structure here. Like here's act one. There'll be five, six different post-its. Here's act two and keep doing it. And then it helps me visualize the story differently. It puts different pressure, it's just a different way to go about structuring it instead of an outline. And then I can also move those post-its all around. And there's software, like I then translated to the software called Scrivener. Have people heard about Scrivener? Or Storius? There's a lot of great softwares out there. Storius and Scrivener were both developed during NaNoWriMo by writers who were using word and thought it was horribly insufficient for writing a novel. So they coded new software and brought it out. So both great softwares. Any questions on the planning, panting topic? I'm getting a sign that we're getting crazy movements Yeah, any final questions? I think I'm being told that we're out of time. Yeah, no questions. All right, you're leaving, you're certain you have all the knowledge you need to write your books, to wake up every day and be inspired to write for at least 15 minutes a day like Toni Morrison. So thank you for coming. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.