Oh iPhone how I heart thee

So I'm trying to write a 100K novel from May 11 to June 10. 30K of word vomit sheer poetry down so far. None of this would be possible without my secret weapon. My precious.

Oh iPhone. How did I write anything before you? It was like I never knew writing at a break-neck pace, until I knew you.

Top five reasons why the iPhone is the ultimate writing machine:

1. Incredible bed and covers synergy. With the iPhone you can write curled up in bed under the covers. You don't need a desk. You don't need a chair. You don't even need LIGHT. Because all the little keys glow. Like tiny, nurturing suns.

2. Carry it anywhere! No more lugging the laptop downstairs to the coffee shop. No more scribble-filled napkins and receipts stuffed in your pockets, purses, boyfriend's pockets, and bra straps because you didn't have a proper notebook with you.

3. No distractions. Yes, there's internet on it. But it's small and slow and I'm too cheap to afford a decent data plan. There's nothing between me and book. Nothing. Not even A KEYBOARD. Except Puzzle Quest for the iPhone. Fie on you Puzzle Quest!

fie

4. Ultimate efficiency. Now when I have a free second, I don't have to waste it texting friends, thinking or having conversations with people. Carry an iPhone in your pocket and every spare nanomoment can be spent writing as fast as your thumbs can fly. Fly thumbs, fly fly fly.

5. Much easier to write while driving. Relax, I'm kidding.

Is this what heaven looks like?

Props where props is due: I was inspired to try this by the lovely and talented Lauren Oliver, who wrote most of Before I Fall on her smart phone. Damn was she on to something. Proving once again she is a dynamo on so many dynamo-tastic levels.

Does YA Objectify Guys?

One of my favorite ways to pass the time at home (and work, yikes) is reading blurbs about upcoming YA books. Like movie trailers, the little plot paragraphs on Amazon give me exquisite tingles of anticipation. But lately my happy tingles have been stopped cold by a line I seem to read everywhere these days: "And then she meets unbelievably gorgeous Boy X." Really? Again?

It wouldn't be so bad if the boys were just super hot, but too often they're perfect too. Yesterday I was reading a new book (otherwise excellent) where the main boy was the hottest guy in school, was a perfect gentleman despite the MC being a giant bitch, and devoted his life completely to the girl after knowing her for five minutes. That sounds more like a wish-fulfillment robot than any 17 year-old guy I've ever met. Crap, the 25 year-old guys I know are nothing like that.

Okay okay I know. YA readers and writers love to fantasize about the slightly dangerous but oh-so-perfect boy who will risk his life for us even though he's knee-meltingly gorgeous and, well, no one's ever actually asked us on a date before. But I think we writers need to back away from this. It's starting to border on objectification - just as bad as women are objectified in pron and really awful action movies.

Does/did anyone out there actually have a "hottest guy in school" anyway?
Are they holding elections now or something?

Of course there are loads of great books where the guy has his own awesome thing going on. Kartik from the Gemma Doyle Trilogy and Hannah Moskowitz's great boy-friendly books come to mind. But I see the reverse too often to feel entirely comfortable about it, even in my own writing. It's easy to make our lead characters flawed, because often they are a reflection, however refracted, of ourselves. Making the person "we" fall in love with imperfect is harder, because in some ways the author is as blind to his faults as the smitten MC.

The antidote, I think, is to put more thought into our male characters (or make our boyfriends read our books. The boy shredded the male characters in my first book). The best guy characters have goals and interests (and maybe even agendas!) that have nothing to do with the main girl. They have flaws like real teenage boys. They play too many video games and speak mostly in Colbert Report and Archer quotes and generally space out (my 19 yo brother is proof of this).

It's okay to make a perfect character once and a while. But there should be a good reason for it, like he's not very handsome so he makes up for it in charm, or he's grown up desperate to please his OCD mother who's the general of an interstellar space armada. Everyone has flaws. Even our mysterious demi-god-werewolf-ghost boyfriends who just transferred to our high school school from Borneo who OMG is so dreamy.

How do you avoid cardboard characters of the opposite sex?

Inspiration - Place

Okay, well, my ambitious plan to blog from China completely failed, for 3 reasons: 1. Jetlag, 2. Spotty internet access, 3. China's lack of open container laws, which equaled lots of drunken stumbling down the streets of Shanghai. The upside is that now I can use China to write about how places can inspire us.

For me, place is always the initial genesis of any idea. When I walk into a beautiful or mysterious place, my mind instantly starts filling it with stories. Like these places are so full of longing and drama in their very stones, only the human emotion of a story can do them justice. Transporting the reader to these places is a vital part of any fiction writing. I fully accept that there are geniuses out there who can make up fantastic places in their minds. But for non-geniuses like myself, traveling, taking photographs and just plain getting out of the house are the first steps in creating evocative settings.

Photos by the inestimable Geoff Gailey

These are some photos from the wind whipped steps of the Great Wall an hour outside of Beijing. Before I went here, I might have described a ruin as crumbling stones. Boring, blah. But after actually being there, I know what it looks like when the narrow trunks of trees crack neat rows of cobblestones and pound the stone to fine gray dust. I know how black-backed beetles sit flicking their wings at the top of abandoned staircases, the only life for miles as the walls fade into the horizon, hazy with smoke from the burning fields far below.

Place is why writing will never be an all-day butt-in-chair affair (not even with Google Images!). Humans are visual creatures, and to create settings that our readers can see, we must first see with our own eyes. I hope the way I felt at the Great Wall will someday become a story. I know I felt the same way when I walked through the dark streets of Boston just as the first cold of fall was coming on. That feeling became my novel, Petrified, and even when the sun is out, the story (I hope) retains that chill.

What places have inspired you?

Inspiration

Some people say that the hardest part of writing is editing, some plotting. For others it's just plain applying ass to chair. But for me, the toughest step has always been the first: finding your inspiration. That singular idea you can't ignore, that starts as a tickle in the back of your mind and becomes an opus in the space of your walk home. Exciting times, and terrifying too. Is it a stupid idea? Unoriginal? Will my friends and family think I'm insane/boring/ripping off Twilight?

Inspiration is a lot like love. Once you're about 20K words in, you and your manuscript get comfortable with each other. Like any relationship, you fight sometimes, go without talking for days on end, pass lazy afternoons in front of the TV. But the beginning is complete infatuation. It still makes my heart pound to remember those first dizzying weeks of inspiration. I remember feeling out of breath and slightly queasy, staring for hours on end at two pages of ideas in single-spaced text and the cursor blink blink blinking at the end, like it's saying "Yeah? What next?"

Inspiration can come from anywhere: dreams, places, people, even other books (as long as you're not too inspired by them, ha). I've been thinking a lot about this lately - about how bad things, hard times, strange experiences can be the best inspiration - so over the next week, I'd like to spend some time thinking about where ideas come from.

P.S. I'll be blogging all this from China! Whoo!

Stand Up While Writing!

Prepare for the science journalist in me to come out. Ready? Okay - Scientists have known for years that sitting all day is bad for your health. Even when they have similar weights, diets and exercise habits, people who spend more time sitting have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and other nasties. So what's a good writer to do? We've still got to pump out our 1000-2000 words per day, weak sniveling circulatory systems be damned.

The answer of course, since I gave it away in the title, is to stand up while you write. It'll keep the pounds off, the blood circulation up and ensure that you'll still be writing best-sellers well into your gnarly nineties. But it can also help your brain. Ever notice that when you get a flash of inspiration, you jump up and crouch over your keyboard with your arms bent at weird angles like a T-Rex feasting on the carcass of a Greatideaosaurus? It's completely natural to stand up while doing something creative and mentally taxing. Sitting is great for perusing blog posts, but for writing the thrilling final chapter of your opus, you gotta take a stand.


Apparently there are no good pictures of typing dinosaurs on the internet.

There's all sorts of nifty desk gadgets out there to help you do this. Most are above my price range (about $10), at least until I move into my new apartment. But I've written on top of dressers, book shelves, and, unwisely, my stove. Risk of spontaneous computer immolation aside, it feels great and most importantly helps me write more and write better. Without the heart disease!

Real Life vs. Writing Life

Despite some very good intentioned vows to blog regularly, I have totally failed to post here for the past two months. I have a good reason, though: I (finally) got a full-time job.

At first, I had mixed feelings about it. It's a wonderful job working in wildlife conservation, something even more important to me (and the world) than books.  I wanted to be writer since I was 12. I wanted to save animals since I was 6.  So I guess this dream has seniority.

But I miss being able to write all day long every day. Sure, it sucked when we couldn't pay the rent and my boyfriend begged me to get a job as a barista. But before he came home, my days were endless, free-wheeling riots of imagination. I came up with ideas for and started no less than 5 new books.  And I miss it.

Now, here's where the "mixed" part of my "feelings" comes in: Even after my six month wonderland of writing, I'm happier working.  Even with my 1.5 hour commute because we fail at finding a new apartment, I'm happier now in my little office than I was at home.  Because I love getting out, living, contributing to the world.  Not just the fantasy worlds in my head.

But here's the silver lining to the cloud that's already pretty fluffy and awesome: Working makes us better writers too.  Why?  Because you have to interact with lots of different people and see all the struggles in the world before you can write well.  Do you think Kurt Vonnegut would have been a quarter as trenchant if he hadn't worked as a used car salesman first?  Hell no!

Plus, I get to spend all day learning about these:


African Wild Dogs :)  Dying in Zimbabwe :(



Saigas :)  Dying in Uzbekistan :(



Cheetahs :)  Dying in Botswana :(

(I realize that one line about not being able to pay the rent makes my life sound like a huge bummer.  But it's not!  Actually, the times when I've been dirt poor have been some of the happiest of my life. Hm.  I think there might be a post in there.)

The Secret to Writing a Novel

Okay, I just want to announce to the internet that I have discovered the secret to writing a novel. This is it, are you ready for it? Okay, really now - are you ready?

Write 500 words every day.

That's it. 500 words that you make up is practically nothing. It should take you a half-hour tops. Here's some math for all you doubting, uh, Dorises: 100,000 / 500 = 200

That's right, 200 days to write a 100,000 page novel. Bam. It's like NaNIWRiMO except without the suffering, arbitrarily capitalized letters and it takes a lot longer too. But that's okay, because no suffering.

I've been doing this for, like, 7 days and it's been awesome! I already have 500 x 7 = 3500 words done on a new book.