Turning Close Friends Into Obligations
(Note: This is the first in a series of excerpts from "No Plot? No Problem!" that I'll be posting here over the course of the next month and a half. The few excerpts I'll be publishing here are no substitute for getting an actual copy of the book, which I continue to strongly recommend.)
Gentle encouragement from friends and family, however, is just the start. Warm smiles and you-can-do-it e-mails won't keep your butt in the chair when you're ready to give up in the middle of Week Two. After collecting a group of cheerleaders, the next step is to leverage all their goodwill into usable quantities of fear.
Yep. Terror is the amateur novelist's best friend. Without some amount of it pushing you onward toward your goal, you're going to lose momentum and quit. There are just too many other, more sensible things to do with your time than trying to write a novel in a month, and all of these more interesting alternatives will become irresistable if you don't have some fear binding your to your word-processing device.
Happily, with a little work, your friends and family can terrify you in ways that you never imagined.
Bragging as a Tool for Self-Motivation
When inculcating a healthy amount of fear, bragging is an indispensible tool. Nothing makes it more difficult to back down from a task than having boasted about it, in great detail, to your friends and loved ones. Think about it: Do you really want to be the butt of jokes every time novels are mentioned? For the rest of your life? Or have to hear your mother sigh when she learns that you have botched yet another attempt at making something of yourself?
I don't either. Which is why I make a point of laying a solid foundation of bragging way before I've thought about plot or setting or character. My ultimate goal is to back myself so far into a corner before the month starts that I have no choice but to stay on course with the word count, no matter how dismally off-track my novel gets in the weeks that follow.
In this way, bragging is an essential device for creating expectations. Not for genius prose, mind you. No, what you want to do is set up expectations for completion. For staying on-track. For seeing your way through to 50,000 words.
Some people pay personal trainers thousands of dollars to receive this sort of ongoing, disappointment-based motivation. Smart people get it from friends and family for free. Begin talking about your imminent ascent of the novelling ladder immediately after you have those first discussions with your friends about the thirty day plunge.
In our wired age, e-mail is the most efficient path to acquiring mass motivation. Send out long boasting e-mails to everyone you know about your quest. Look up long-lost classmates to inform them that you will be a novellist in a couple of months. If you have a novel-friendly office, spam your department with your good writing news. This kind of outreach nets you, the writer, two invaluable things:
1. Constant motivational/envious/resentful check-ins from friends throughout the month about how the novel is going.
2. An irresistable invitation to widespread mockery should you not actually reach 50,000 words.
Betting the Bank
Lustily bragging about your upcoming noveling exploits often segues beautifully into the next recommended prewriting strategy: leveling huge, possibly crippling debts against the outcome of your novel.
For Andrew Johnson, twenty-nine, of Christchurch, New Zealand, the opportunity came at the office.
"A disbelieving workmate challenged me when I said, 'I bet I can do it,'" recalls the three-time NaNoWriMo winner.
"'Okay,' I said, 'How much?' I took fifty dollar bets from any person willing to stake their cash on me being unable to complete the novel."
Andrew finished out the month with both a new novel and a little extra pocket money. Unfortunately, he had to retire the scheme soon thereafter.
"Oddly, it only worked for one year," Andrew writes. "Those who get stung by a fanatical NaNoWriMo once are going to avoid being stung again in the future."
If you're having trouble finding people kind enough to bet against you, you can still leverage the same motivating fear of total financial ruin through "conditional donations".
This path was pioneered by a month-long novelist writing outside of NaNoWriMo. In May 2001, an aspiring writer named Paul Griffiths announced that if he failed in his quest to write a 60,000 word novel in one month, he would donate his entire life savings to the National Rifle Association.
Paul was not a fan of the NRA, and was very enamored of his savings account, and these two things combined to give him all the incentive he needed to get the novel finished.
To follow in Paul's footsteps, here's all you have to do:
1. Find an organization you detest. If you are stuck for ideas, call your favourite charity and ask for a list of groups who are out to destroy them. Be sure not to choose a good or righteous cause, as this may make giving up on your novel mid-month feel like a philanthropic act.
2. Once you've selected a suitably villainous group, break out your checkbook and write a check to them. Make the amount large enough to wreak havoc on your finances, but small enough that you won't be tempted to put a stop payment on the check should it ever actually make it to them.
3. Seal the check in an evelope, address it, and then give the envelope to a friend with strict instructions to return the money to you should you complete 50,000 words of fiction in a month's time. Should you fail to reach 50,000 words, he or she should do you the favour of dropping the cheque in the mail.
4. Inform your friend that someone posing as you may return in thirty days to plead for the money, claiming that the whole novel-writing thing was a dumb idea. If this happens, make your friend promise to restrain the imposter until the police arrive.
There you have it: intense literary motivation for the price of the stamp. And when you do finish the novel in thirty days, you are both a novelist and a righteous crusader, having kept a small fortune out of the hands of evildoers. Way to go, superhero!
(Note: This is the first in a series of excerpts from "No Plot? No Problem!" that I'll be posting here over the course of the next month and a half. The few excerpts I'll be publishing here are no substitute for getting an actual copy of the book, which I continue to strongly recommend.)
Gentle encouragement from friends and family, however, is just the start. Warm smiles and you-can-do-it e-mails won't keep your butt in the chair when you're ready to give up in the middle of Week Two. After collecting a group of cheerleaders, the next step is to leverage all their goodwill into usable quantities of fear.
Yep. Terror is the amateur novelist's best friend. Without some amount of it pushing you onward toward your goal, you're going to lose momentum and quit. There are just too many other, more sensible things to do with your time than trying to write a novel in a month, and all of these more interesting alternatives will become irresistable if you don't have some fear binding your to your word-processing device.
Happily, with a little work, your friends and family can terrify you in ways that you never imagined.
Bragging as a Tool for Self-Motivation
When inculcating a healthy amount of fear, bragging is an indispensible tool. Nothing makes it more difficult to back down from a task than having boasted about it, in great detail, to your friends and loved ones. Think about it: Do you really want to be the butt of jokes every time novels are mentioned? For the rest of your life? Or have to hear your mother sigh when she learns that you have botched yet another attempt at making something of yourself?
I don't either. Which is why I make a point of laying a solid foundation of bragging way before I've thought about plot or setting or character. My ultimate goal is to back myself so far into a corner before the month starts that I have no choice but to stay on course with the word count, no matter how dismally off-track my novel gets in the weeks that follow.
In this way, bragging is an essential device for creating expectations. Not for genius prose, mind you. No, what you want to do is set up expectations for completion. For staying on-track. For seeing your way through to 50,000 words.
Some people pay personal trainers thousands of dollars to receive this sort of ongoing, disappointment-based motivation. Smart people get it from friends and family for free. Begin talking about your imminent ascent of the novelling ladder immediately after you have those first discussions with your friends about the thirty day plunge.
In our wired age, e-mail is the most efficient path to acquiring mass motivation. Send out long boasting e-mails to everyone you know about your quest. Look up long-lost classmates to inform them that you will be a novellist in a couple of months. If you have a novel-friendly office, spam your department with your good writing news. This kind of outreach nets you, the writer, two invaluable things:
1. Constant motivational/envious/resentful check-ins from friends throughout the month about how the novel is going.
2. An irresistable invitation to widespread mockery should you not actually reach 50,000 words.
Betting the Bank
Lustily bragging about your upcoming noveling exploits often segues beautifully into the next recommended prewriting strategy: leveling huge, possibly crippling debts against the outcome of your novel.
For Andrew Johnson, twenty-nine, of Christchurch, New Zealand, the opportunity came at the office.
"A disbelieving workmate challenged me when I said, 'I bet I can do it,'" recalls the three-time NaNoWriMo winner.
"'Okay,' I said, 'How much?' I took fifty dollar bets from any person willing to stake their cash on me being unable to complete the novel."
Andrew finished out the month with both a new novel and a little extra pocket money. Unfortunately, he had to retire the scheme soon thereafter.
"Oddly, it only worked for one year," Andrew writes. "Those who get stung by a fanatical NaNoWriMo once are going to avoid being stung again in the future."
If you're having trouble finding people kind enough to bet against you, you can still leverage the same motivating fear of total financial ruin through "conditional donations".
This path was pioneered by a month-long novelist writing outside of NaNoWriMo. In May 2001, an aspiring writer named Paul Griffiths announced that if he failed in his quest to write a 60,000 word novel in one month, he would donate his entire life savings to the National Rifle Association.
Paul was not a fan of the NRA, and was very enamored of his savings account, and these two things combined to give him all the incentive he needed to get the novel finished.
To follow in Paul's footsteps, here's all you have to do:
1. Find an organization you detest. If you are stuck for ideas, call your favourite charity and ask for a list of groups who are out to destroy them. Be sure not to choose a good or righteous cause, as this may make giving up on your novel mid-month feel like a philanthropic act.
2. Once you've selected a suitably villainous group, break out your checkbook and write a check to them. Make the amount large enough to wreak havoc on your finances, but small enough that you won't be tempted to put a stop payment on the check should it ever actually make it to them.
3. Seal the check in an evelope, address it, and then give the envelope to a friend with strict instructions to return the money to you should you complete 50,000 words of fiction in a month's time. Should you fail to reach 50,000 words, he or she should do you the favour of dropping the cheque in the mail.
4. Inform your friend that someone posing as you may return in thirty days to plead for the money, claiming that the whole novel-writing thing was a dumb idea. If this happens, make your friend promise to restrain the imposter until the police arrive.
There you have it: intense literary motivation for the price of the stamp. And when you do finish the novel in thirty days, you are both a novelist and a righteous crusader, having kept a small fortune out of the hands of evildoers. Way to go, superhero!
posted by "Steve Smith" at 1:28 PM
3 Comments:
I just want to point out that during the month that we are doing this I won't have a fucking job! It's only bragging if you're doing something hard.
Plenty of people experience a month of unemployment at some point during their lives. How many of those people use that time to write a novel?
Exactly.
I think you missed the point Steve.
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