This is great – a writing teacher’s blog

How wonderful, this teacher of creative writing is sharing his classes and ideas on a blog. I don’t have time for a creative writing course right now but at least I can read about one

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I’m sincerely touched – someone wrote something nice about my blog on their blog. I feel like a real blogger now – hehe. Here’s the link to secret mojo

the spirit of freecycle

For anyone who doesn’t know and is interested, Freecycle is a concept where people use email to give away unwanted possessions. Like the concept of “reuse” rather than recycle, really. Like ebay without the money.

It’s a great philosophy to live by. Easy come, easy go. Be willing to give things away easily and be willing to receive. Don’t expect a return for what you give.

NaNoWriMo

For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is national novel writing month. The participants log into a website and attempt to write a novel in a month. There’s a great sense of camaraderie, and heaps of message boards. Anyone can “win” Nanowrimo if they get up to the required word count (can’t remember how much – but it’s achievable). There is no judging novels on quality etc.

I did this in the last month of my pregnancy with twins, because I wasn’t moving anywhere much so I thought I may as well write. However, now I think I would have been much better off just doing a blog and trying to get some bits of a novel out of the blog.

Because – a novel or story has to come at it’s own pace. It cannot force itself out in a month. You end up writing something – it may even be a novel, with characters and a plot. But what they are doing will probably be a bit pointless. At least that’s what happened to me. The characters had to do something, so I made them do things, but in the end the question was – so what.

The story has to arise, from wherever it comes, at it’s own pace. Yes you can create space for the story to emerge, by actually being there to write it – but it can’t be forced out in a month. You can obviously speed up the pace of novel writing and be prolific, but only to a point. Some great novels take years. Some bad novels take years and some take weeks. But very few great novels are written in a month.

My opinion only! Apologies to the creators of the site – I think it’s really great in many ways, such as to inspire people to write novels and to create good community for aspiring writers. But for me, it’s not the way to write a real novel.

Then again I’ve never written one, and it may never happen!