Be Your Own Editor

A quick (and overdue) congrats to my friend W, who did, in fact, complete her National Novel Writing Month word-count goal in November. Yay! Is it a finished, publishable work? No. But she’s feeling good about producing some material she can work with, whether it becomes a novel or a few stories or whatever. You rock, W.

As for myself, I am officially designating January “National Chapter-Writing Month,” and I plan to complete the first chapter of my own novel by month’s end. I wrote several chapters during the “Finish a Draft of Your Novel in Three Months” class I took last summer, but, well, they sucked and need to be completely rewritten. Wish me luck! I’ll need it, especially since my Christmas stocking was filled with Barnes & Noble gift cards, so it’ll be hard not to spend the whole month reading.

By the way, sorry I’ve been lax in answering reader questions recently… I’ll get caught up soon, I promise!

You may have heard of an endeavor called National Novel Writing Month, affectionately referred to by its creators and participants as NaNoWriMo (unless they want to avoid sounding really goofy, in which case they refer to it as National Novel Writing Month).

The project is gaining popularity and notoriety every year, and since my friend W. is participating this year (the month in question, by the way, is November), I thought I’d take a closer look and think about how such exercises can help the struggling novelist.

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Courtesy of the the fine folks at the Edit Red writing website. As a New Yorker, I think I might be too overwhelmed with ideas to enter this one myself:

“City Smells” is a new literary project set up by the Edit Red Writing Community.

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Some of you have been following my trials and travails as a participant this winter at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. It’s been a valuable experience not only because of the opportunity it’s provided for a workshop/critique environment, but also for the interesting writing exercises we’ve done each week. Ugh, I hate writing exercises. I hear you. Was I thrilled at the prospect of writing a page describing… a place? No. But that’s the beauty of exercises: they’re not written for publication (or necessarily for anyone else’s eyes at all), so they allow you to free your mind and let loose your creativity.

Now I’d like to see what you all can do with a simple exercise. It’ll take you just a few minutes, and I guarantee you’ll get either an interesting idea or simply food for thought out of it. And if I really like it, you’ll get an autographed hardcover copy of Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed memoir The Discomfort Zone.

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A recent perusal of the magazine section at Barnes & Noble told me what I already suspected: the pickings of useful magazines for writers (that’s writers, not readers) are slim indeed. I bought all four, and sat down to peruse Writers’ Journal first. My conclusion? While the magazine contains some too-vague advice and off-topic filler, it peppers its pages with enough useful tips to make it worth the $19.97 annual subscription fee for six issues—but only if you’re a novice writer.

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Thanks to all of you who submitted responses to my writing exercise. As a reminder, the instructions were to tell the following story in just three paragraphs:

A woman rushing to an appointment has a fender-bender, resulting in her meeting an intriguing man.

I received dozens of imaginative and intriguing efforts, but the following story emerged as my favorite. Nice writing, Lucy from Santa Barbara! Lucy will be receiving a free copy of Alice McDermott’s lovely new novel After This.

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