I started 2011 on a mission: read ten million words of fiction. I got to wondering what it would be like just to blast my brain with words, words, words, for a whole year. So I bought a lot of books and went to work. In the end, I didn’t make it, which is just as well because the stack you see here pretty well pushes the limits of what I can read and still get enough sleep to be a functional human being. And besides, if I had reached ten million, I’d never have been able to stack them all up. But still, I did pretty well. The stack you see is 70 books, and about 5.1 million words.

So what did I learn?

I have little patience for bad books

I finished them once I started, but reading that much, you want it to be an enjoyable experience. So when certain titles which shall remain nameless kept poking me in the eyes with awful writing, cliché plots, or horrible point-of-view abuses, it’s not fun. It starts to feel like work. Somehow, I doubt that’s the experience most writers want to give their readers. And while I won’t name the specific titles, I can say that the most disappointing books in the stack were all middle grade titles. Now, I grant you I am many standard deviations away from the mean age of a middle-grade reader, but I like to write for middle grade audiences, I have a budding middle-grader in my household, and I take to heart Maxim Gorky’s quote:

You must write for children in the same way you do for adults, only better.

Those titles didn’t do that.

I’m pretty picky about perfection

Not only did I do word count estimates of all those titles, I also rated them for my own amusement. And out of the 70, only three titles got a perfect 4-star rating from me. Two of them are classics, which I readily admit I judge differently than modern titles: Kurt Vonnegut’s stellar Cat’s Cradle, which is just sublime in its juxtaposition of deeply philosophical ideas against absurdist skewering of, well, everything. And antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, which I simply adore because it is sweet and beautiful and utterly distilled down to its barest, simplest possible essence. If you want to study spare writing, that’s your textbook. Also, the scene with the fox kills me every time.

The only modern book to score a 4, well, that’s as good a segue into a top-ten list as any:

My top reads of 2011

10: Ramona the Pest, by Beverly Cleary. By number of titles written in my stack, Beverly Cleary is this year’s clear winning author. I read the entire Ramona Quimby series and the entire Henry Huggins series to my kids for bedtime stories over the summer. If, like me, you like to write for middle-grade audiences you could do a whole lot worse than to blast your brain with a whole bunch of Beverly Cleary. I was particularly struck by the elegance and truth with which she captures the feeling of being a little kid. Really, several of Cleary’s titles were approximately as good as Ramona the Pest, but I pick this one for my top-ten list because of its utterly immaculate plotting. Everything in that book is there for two reasons. First, it all supports the scenes in which you find it, but second, it sets up lovely twists, surprises, and hilarious situations for later. It’s brilliantly done, and I’ll admit I’ve recommended that book to more than one of my clients as homework, just to study the plotting.

9: Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech. This is the Newberry Medalist winner from 1994, and I can’t really argue with the committee’s selection. It’s a lovely, quiet story, very intimate and personal to its protagonist. That’s a story oeuvre I particularly enjoy, and this title nailed it. But I was also totally impressed with Creech’s facile use of a parallel storyline structure, past and present, to explore the book’s overall theme of loss and healing. Great read.

8: The Curse of the Blue Tattoo, by L.A. Meyer. This is book 2 in the Bloody Jack adventures series. I absolutely adored book one of this series so much I went right out and bought the next five of them, and they’re so good I’m rationing them out to make them last. If you don’t know Bloody Jack, start with the first book—it’s amazing, and has such an incredible character hook on page 1 that I’ve used it as an example in lectures I’ve given on hooking the reader. Anyway, even though Blue Tattoo spends a lot of time setting things up that will clearly be used in later books, and even though it spends not a page on the high seas as book 1 does, it still presents a great storyline, good mystery and danger, and is a very credible sequel. If I ever dare write a sequel to any of my novels, I can only hope to measure up as well.

7: Factotum, by D.M. Cornish. I talk up D.M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo series every chance I get, because they’re amazing books. Factotum is the third and presumably final in the series, which begins with Foundling. This is straight-up high fantasy, and it is arguably the equal of Tolkien. Them’s fightin’ words, I know, and I do not say them lightly. What’s amazing about this whole series—besides the characters, and the story, and the writing—the thing that makes me talk the series up, is the world-building. Cornish has a savant-like imagination. I don’t know how he fits the world of the Half-Continent and an understanding of the real world into his head at the same time. Tolkien was a great world-builder, but I promise you, you’ve never seen world-building done like D.M. Cornish. The contrast between the two comes in the use of invented language. Tolkien invented whole languages and alphabets for his fictional cultures, but they remain foreign languages; Cornish has taken the business of coining words to a whole new level, and does so in a way that at once adds marvelous texture and color to his world, while also being immediately understandable to the reader. You don’t need a separate glossary to understand D.M. Cornish’s invented language, although one is provided. I certainly hope Cornish writes more Half-Continent stories, and I feel comfortable suggesting that any modern writer of fantasy literature needs to put Cornish on their must-read list.

6: The Winter of Frankie Machine, by Don Winslow. This is a crime novel set in the underworld of the Southern California mafia scene. What happens when a mob hitter tries to go straight? What happens when his past catches up to him? Frankie Machine’s the hitter, and his past is something else. What I loved about this book was, actually, Frankie himself. Rarely, if ever, have I seen a better example of how you get a reader to sympathize with a dark protagonist. Because let’s be clear, the guy’s no saint. And he doesn’t claim to be. Nevertheless, I defy you to read the book and not find yourself rooting for Frankie to win.

5: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente. I think if you took the whimsy and imaginative playfulness of The Phantom Tollbooth, mixed it with the dark undercurrent of Alice in Wonderland, and rendered the result as a modern fairy tale, you’d get something like this book. At any rate, that’s how I found it: an utterly charming modern fairy tale, with a malignant darkness hiding, only hinted at, underneath. Just the sort of thing for kids of all ages.

4: Shadowed Summer, by Saundra Mitchell. This is a southern gothic, paranormal teen novel. It’s quite short, and a very fast read, but it is oh so evocative of its setting. You almost feel like you’re there. The writing is lovey, and the story is brilliantly plotted with (at least to me) a great twist at the end. The perfect kind of twist that leaves the reader kicking themselves for not seeing it coming. Just wonderful stuff.

3: Chime, by Franny Billingsley. This is another teen paranormal, but this one bordering on fantasy, set in some nebulously-rural English village in the early 1900s. I loved the characters in this novel, but was especially impressed with Billingsley’s narrative voice. Or, should I say, her protagonist’s voice, as the book is written in first person. The story’s no small potatoes either. It builds to a high-stakes climax, piling layer upon layer of mystery as it goes. But oh, that voice. The book could have been twice as long and I’d have been glad to read every page of it.

2: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender. I don’t know what’s up with me and the paranormals crowding the top of this list, because to be honest, I don’t actually read all that much paranormal. But, here in the number 2 slot, we find the most unusually-premised paranormal I can recall ever having read. I suspect all of us have, at some point or another, had that conversation with our friends: “what super power would you want to have?” Rose Edelstein’s super power is to taste the emotions of whoever made the food she eats. Super power, or super curse? That depends, and Aimee Bender does absolutely yeoman work in fully thinking through the ramifications of such an ability, while also wrapping them up in, as the Los Angeles Times calls it, an “ethereal and surprisingly weighty” story.

1: The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, by Walter Mosley. This is the only book I read this year, outside of those two classics, to earn four stars from me. Mosley is a highly experienced writer, and it shows, although this is the first book of his I’ve ever read. I hardly know what to say about this novel, other than it’s astonishingly, shockingly, good. Brilliant, even. The writing? Smooth as glass. The voice? Impeccable and completely captivating. The plot? Quiet, but very high-stakes for its protagonist. And the love story woven through it? Like nothing you’ve ever seen. If you read nothing else on this list, read The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. It’s a powerful piece of work, and I stand in awe.

So that’s what I did in 2011. What were your favorite reads of the year? Share them in the comments!

I have a confession to make. I’m a murderer. Only in the third degree—I didn’t mean to—but murder is murder.

You know what I remember most about writing my first manuscript? Writing the ending. I’d had such a wonderful time writing that whole manuscript. I loved those characters. When I wrote what I knew was the last scene, I became so choked up the lump in my throat literally hurt.

The story was done. They were done. But I wasn’t ready to let those characters go.

So what did I do? I wrote an epilogue. It’s a sweet epilogue. Kind of sappy. To this day I still like it. It gave me a chance to say the goodbye I wasn’t ready for in the last scene.

But it killed the characters. I didn’t understand that at the time, but it did.

I don’t mean I literally killed the characters off in the epilogue. They got their happily-ever-after. What I mean is that I killed them for the reader. Without meaning to, I murdered my beloved characters.

I did it in my second manuscript, too, before one of my critiquers told me to cut it. “You don’t need that,” he said. “It’s too much.” I rankled at that piece of feedback. I liked my epilogue. It was sweet, kind of sappy, and let me say goodbye. But the cool thing about writing is you can undo any mistake, even murder. I gritted my teeth, cut the epilogue, and brought my characters back to life.

So when I see my clients accidentally kill their characters at the end of the book, I understand. Sometimes I can tell that my client is looking for their own emotional closure on the book, just like I was. Sometimes, it’s equally evident that my clients feel like they have to wrap up all the threads to give readers perfect closure on everything.

I’ve been there. I understand that drive. But I’ve now written enough manuscripts of my own and analyzed enough from my clients that I can finally articulate what that critiquer meant when he said my epilogue was too much. He meant I was killing the characters.

Not for me. Not in the story. But for him.

The purpose of a denouement

To explain what that means, I need to establish a little groundwork about a novel’s ending—or if you’re writing an epic series, about the end of the last book in the series. Your story builds to a gripping peak. You write a climax that resolves the story’s major issues one way or another. And then there’s the denouement at the end.

Ask people what’s supposed to go between the climax and the final page, and they’ll say things like “that’s where you wrap up any loose threads,” or “that’s where you bring the reader back down from the emotional high of the climax, so they don’t leave the book feeling unsettled.”

True, but trivial. That’s tactics, not strategy.

The strategic purpose of a denouement is to reorient the characters towards the next phase of their lives.

You might indeed do that by wrapping up loose ends. You might do it by giving a flash-forward scene that shows a less tumultuous time in the characters’ lives. It is in how you implement those various strategies that you will either accidentally murder your characters, or will allow them to live. The difference lies in whether you keep your denouement focused on reorienting the characters, or whether you stray too far outside those bounds.

That’s what my critiquer was trying to tell me. “Your epilogue goes way beyond reorienting the characters towards the next phase of their lives.”

The important bit

Reorienting, that’s the important bit. The reason for this has nothing to do with you. It has nothing to do with the characters, either. It has everything to do with the reader.

As readers of fiction or watchers of movies, usually we want to leave the story with the feeling that, after the climax, the characters are facing a new, better future. We want to have the belief that they’re going to be ok. We want that same sense of an unbounded but positive future for those characters, that we ourselves have when we conquer major obstacles in our lives: the feeling that “now, anything is possible!”

You graduate high school or college, bursting with the feeling of accomplishment, and confident that you’re going to kick-ass in the rest of your life. You ask the person of your dreams to marry you, they say yes, you endure the ordeal of wedding planning and in-laws, and you head off into your honeymoon feeling like life is just going to be awesome from here on out.

It doesn’t always happen, but that’s how it feels, and that’s the feeling readers just love to leave a book with. Here’s the thing. Simply by seeing the characters turn away from the now-completed problems that led up to the climax, and turn towards something else, we know that they are now facing a new, better future.

We don’t need to be told just what that new, better future is.

Committing murder

That’s how you go too far in a book’s denouement. You do the good work of reorienting the characters, but then you also specify where and how far they go along their new paths.

When you do that, you murder them in the reader’s mind.

Ok, perhaps that’s melodramatic. I guess it’s not so much that you murder them, per se, as it is that you prevent them from living on for us.

This is a tricky point, so bear with me.

As the writer, the characters live for you because you are imagining their feelings and choices and actions and responses and so forth during the events of the main plot. It is your imagination which brings them to life for us.

As readers, we don’t have that same full freedom; we’re not allowed to imagine our own choices and so forth, because those are part of the story. Different choices would lead to a different plot, so obviously the writer has to do that part. The writer must imagine the characters’ choices and present them to us through the narrative.

That difference means that on a very fundamental level, characters in a novel necessarily must feel less alive to the reader than they do to the writer.

This is true from page one up through “the end.” But once we get to “the end,” the situation changes.

When the plot is done, suddenly the doors of possibility are thrown wide open. The characters might now choose anything. They might do anything. How exciting! And having come to know them through the course of the story, we readers are finally in a position to imagine them into further life just like you imagined them into life while you were writing the story.

You had your turn. Now it’s our turn, but only if you allow us to imagine what the characters might do next. If you imagine it for us, we can’t. If you write it all down in a tidy little epilogue or final chapter—if you let us know that Mary Louise got her biology degree and went on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine for her work on tissue regeneration, while Charlie eventually bounced back from the breakup, married another woman in Iowa, had two kids and a dog and settled down to a modest life as an auto mechanic—then we don’t get our turn.

If you imagine the rest for us, we cannot then imagine them into further life. Murderer!

Reorient the characters. Then stop.

Just don’t be so specific about your story’s Mary Louise and Charlie. Leave it more open-ended:

Mary Louise slipped the envelope from her purse and walked into the post office. She stood in line. Two people ahead of her, she saw the back of a familiar brown leather jacket.

Awkward, she thought, but not as awkward as saying nothing.

“Charlie?”

Charlie turned. “Oh. Hey. What’s up?”

Mary Louise motioned with the envelope. “Grad school application.” His usual Sunday-evening stubble looked out of place on a Wednesday morning. “How are you doing, Charlie?”

He shrugged. “Not great, really. But I’ll be ok. It’s cool.” She glanced down. After all those years together, how strange not to have anything left to say. He held up a form. “Change of address. I’m going to Iowa,” he said.

“Wow. Your dad’s?”

“Yeah. He’s talking about retiring. He keeps hinting for me to take over the shop, but you know him. He won’t just come right out and say it. I figure I’ll give it a try.”

Mary Louise smiled. “You should. I think you’ll like it. You always were good with your hands.”

Reorient. Point Mary Louise at grad school. Point Charlie at Iowa. Then stop, so the reader can imagine the rest. Give us our turn to bring the characters to life.

Leaving aside for a moment that icebergs probably don’t really glow like that on their undersides, the iceberg still makes a nice metaphor for the characters in your book. Or rather, for the process of coming to know who those characters are.

I’d argue that when we think about our novels ahead of time, our conceptions of the characters are much like the visible part of the iceberg. Pretty, but not nearly the whole picture.

The water hides everything else. You cannot see the rest of the iceberg until—and unless—you get into the water. You must swim down, under the cold water, to see the whole thing.

The water, in this metaphor, is the writing.

I will also argue that you cannot truly come to know who your characters are, in all their multi-dimensional glory, until you plunge in and get wet.

Two case studies

This has never been more evident to me than this past November, during National Novel Writing Month. But somehow, this year’s experience helped me understand the iceberg and the water in a new way, so I thought I’d share.

Now first, I’m a plotter, not a pantser. I spend a lot of time before writing figuring out how the story is going to develop, which in turn means figuring out a lot about my main protagonists and antagonists ahead of time. Even before setting out on page one of my novel, I can tell you how my protagonist feels about her general situation in life. I can tell you what she wants. What she’s mad about. I can tell you the same for her mother, her father, and the antagonist who’s going to hound my protagonist’s family for the whole book. For these people, the visible part of the iceberg is a bit bigger. It has to be, because characters drive stories; the plot and the personalities have to mesh just-so in order for the whole thing to work out.

But I don’t spend much time on the minor characters. Their icebergs barely poke up above the water. Before I write, I know their names and how they function in the plot. I have vague mental images of them, but that’s really all. For all my planning, they were barely even one-dimensional characters.

It was only when I jumped into the water this November that I discovered who they were. They became three-dimensional people as I swam around in their scenes. I want to share that process with you, because the thinking behind it isn’t specific to this story. It should work for any writer, and any character, in any scene.

And just to set the stage for you, this novel’s one-sentence pitch is “A frontier girl, the daughter of German immigrants, must help save her family’s homestead from the corrupt railroad barons who would drive them off their land.” It’s a middle-grade western, set in 1863, in the Nebraska Territory.

Mr. Harper

Here’s what I had about Mr. Harper before I started writing. Mr. Harper is a bachelor who lives a country mile down the road from my protagonist’s homestead. He’s good with horses. That’s it. It’s not much to go on, is it? But I figured, he’s a minor character anyway, what does it matter?

Come on. Every character matters.

The first time my 10 year old protagonist Maria meets Mr. Harper, she’s in a bit of a pickle. She has been out on the prairie, away from home, longer than she should. Now night is falling and she has to get home and she knows she’s already going to be in trouble for being out so late. As it happens, she came past Mr. Harper’s homestead on the way back to her own. I wasn’t exactly expecting Mr. Harper to appear at quite this point in the story, but that’s how the preceding scene evolved, so I went with it.

Suddenly, I had to know how Mr. Harper was going to react to Maria’s unexpected, evening arrival at his homestead. His reaction depends entirely on his own attitudes, wishes, and goals—in short, on what he wants—but I didn’t know what that was.

I know what Maria wants. She wants a ride home. And she probably wants a third-party, someone outside of the family, to be around when she gets home in order to temper the severity of her parents’ angry response.

But what does Mr. Harper want? Right there, in that at-the-keyboard moment of working this out, my vague notions of who Mr. Harper might be crashed headlong into my planning of how the story is going to unfold later, with modern-day readers’ mental image of what frontier life was like and how people acted back then, et cetera.

Mr. Harper might want anything. Maybe he’s a greedy rascal and only wants money. Maybe he’s a reclusive type who only wants solitude. There is a whole gamut of things Mr. Harper might want—goals he might have—which will drive his response to Maria’s arrival.

Except I have a story to write, and I need certain things out of him. And when he does those things, I need them to come across as believable expressions of the man I have previously shown him to be. Starting right here with this first time Maria meets him.

In particular, I need readers and Maria’s family to like him, because of things that happen later in the story. He ends up helping them with a lame horse, and when I raise the stakes later, it’s by also threatening his homestead. That won’t play strongly unless readers care about him, too.

All of which means I need him to be nice in this scene. To help her out. That makes sense: out on the prairie you never know when you might need a good neighbor’s help, so even in selfish terms, helping Maria now gives him a store of good will with neighbors who may help him later.

Filtering the spectrum of possible Mr. Harpers through the prism of what the story needs now and will need later, was enough for me to zero in on what kind of guy he is. Simply thinking through the scene from his point of view—even a barely sketched out point of view—was enough to figure out how he’d react.

From there, it was natural to imagine how he would talk to her in a way that was friendly and neighbor-like. In the course of writing that scene, I discovered a congenial southern drawl that seemed to come naturally to him. He became a genuinely friendly guy, the kind of guy who if he lived in 2011 instead of 1863, would just as soon hug you as shake your hand and you’d be ok with that.

Could I have planned this ahead of time? Maybe. But I liked doing it this way better. I think it has a more spontaneous, organic feeling to it than if I’d have tried to over-specify this minor character ahead of time. He was a lot more fun this way, and is actually kind of a scene-stealer.

Mr. LeClerc

Mr. LeClerc is a French-Canadian guy who runs the dry goods store in the nearby frontier town of Columbus. Again, not much to go on. Again, it was only when I jumped into the waters of his first scene that I could see who this character was supposed to be.

Maria meets Mr. LeClerc on the occasion of selling him some baskets she and her mother have made. She and her father are in town to attend to various business, and her father got it into his head that Maria needed to be the one to handle the selling of the baskets, even though she had never done business with anybody before in her life. I didn’t plan that part either, but it seemed like the kind of thing her father would do, so I went with it.

So Maria has to negotiate a price with this Mr. LeClerc, a stranger she has never met before, and the poor thing starts out by asking for a price that’s way, way too low. She has no experience with money. She has no idea what anything really costs, so she blows it. She asks for a nickel each—about $1.25 in today’s money—not nearly enough. When in doubt, make things worse, right?

Now, how does Mr. LeClerc react? Again, his goals are terribly relevant. What does any shopkeeper want? To build up a good business and do well for himself. So maybe he knows a great deal when he sees it, and buys the baskets for a song, never letting on how much she’s getting screwed on the deal.

Maybe, but not so fast. I have a story to write, and things that need to happen later. Next time she sees Mr. LeClerc, in fact, I need for her to trust him. And that’s not going to happen if she gets home and her mother yells at her for not getting a fair price for the baskets. She’ll know she got screwed. I’m left with needing a way for Mr. LeClerc to get her up to a fair price, even though on the surface, he would naturally love to buy a bunch of nicely made baskets for cheap.

Thinking it through from his broader point of view, considering more than just the opportunity of the moment, I realized that it’s not a contradictory situation at all. Mr. LeClerc is a frontier shopkeeper. His clientele is kind of limited. It’s a small town, and he can’t afford to be alienating his customers. This includes Maria’s father. So LeClerc knows that if he screws Maria on the deal, it will likely cost him business later.

From there, it was easy. Once I had thought through LeClerc’s goals within the context of that situation, a solution presented itself. I let him reveal that he wouldn’t feel right about taking advantage of her in that way: He said, “No! If I buy them for one nickel only, I cannot sleep at night!” From there, they worked out a fair price, and I got what I needed too: the plot moved where I wanted, Maria now has reason to trust him later (because he treated her fairly here), and as a bonus, I got some additional insight into what kind of man he is. He’s a basically honest guy, and kind enough to give Maria a way out of her mistake which didn’t humiliate her.

You must swim the waters

Those are just two examples, but I hope they give you the idea. When you’re stuck in a scene for knowing how someone will act, think about what it is they want to get out of the scene. What are their goals and desires? And think about what you need in order to for the story to go where you intend it to. Between the two of those factors, you will be able to figure out what kind of person will give you a reaction that works. That’s how you see the rest of the iceberg.

A month ago, I confessed to you all that I hadn’t finished a manuscript in the past three years. Finishing is a habit, just like writing, and I had gotten into a bad one. I set out into NaNoWriMo this year with the goal not only of getting my 50,000 words, but of finishing the damn manuscript.

And I did it.

I am convinced that the difference between this year and the past three is that I went into November not just with a plan for what the story was going to be, but with a plan for how I was going to finish it in the month. A story plotted out in 29 scenes. One scene per day, with a day’s worth of wiggle-room.

Lo and behold, it worked. Yesterday, I wrote the final scene. I didn’t even end up needing the wiggle room. And it shows in my wordcount graph, which I don’t think has ever been as steady-looking as this:

Sure, some days I wrote less, some days I wrote more. I missed a couple of Sundays and Turkey Day. But having a plan, knowing “I need to get to scene number 17 today,” kept everything on track. I knew there would be days when what I thought was one going to be one scene would morph into two, or I’d think of a new scene to add that I hadn’t when I was planning. And sure enough, that happened. But this year, it didn’t derail me because those additions did not change the cold fact that “I need to get to scene 17 today.”

Having that plan, holding myself to it, made all the difference.

All the pre-planning didn’t stifle my creativity for the writing phase. It didn’t shackle me into notions of the story that could not then change. All it did was put me in a position to say “sure, I can make this change now, but it means I’ll have to write more today, or tomorrow, to stay on track.”

I say this not to gloat (ok, maybe just a wee bit) but because if it worked for me, I don’t see why it can’t work for anybody. It’s so simple I kind of feel stupid even to explain it. It’s just math. How many scenes do you need? How many days do you have? Divide.

Why haven’t I been doing this all along?

This doesn’t mean I can write any novel in a month. What it means is that I now understand how I can write and finish any manuscript before any reasonable deadline. I like a NaNoWriMo-sized novel. It’s enough to be challenging, and to tell a good story. I have a list of other NaNoWriMo-sized novels to take on in future years. But I also have some in mind which are going to be bigger than that. Substantially bigger.

Those novels have felt daunting. And I suppose they still do. But from where I stand today, they feel less daunting than they did 30 days ago. Thirty days ago, those big projects still had the aura of chaos about them. They held a whiff of unwieldy danger, that I might not be able to wrangle them to the finish. But now, I know how to fix them within finite bounds before I begin writing. Now they become tractable.

Still big, but tractable.

Perhaps you are a bolder writer than I. For your sake, I hope so. But for anyone who has had trouble finishing a manuscript, perhaps taking your planning process this one final step may help.

Gentle readers, I have a confession.

I love NaNoWriMo. I have done it every year since 2005, and I have never failed to get my 50,000 words. Sometimes it has been close—like 2008, when post-election burnout induced me to slack of for twelve whole days after the annual Seattle-area Halloween midnight kickoff write-in. Boy did I have to write HARD after that to finish—but I’ve always made it. And I’m proud of that.

That’s not my confession, though. My confession is this: I haven’t finished a manuscript in three years. There, I said it.

That 2008 novel? Aside from blowing off 12 days out of the month, part of why it was so hard is that it wasn’t coming together. It felt forced. Fake. It was supposed to be this YA sci-fi/horror thing, and while I still think the core premise is a worthy one, it just didn’t have the overall feeling I was going for. I got to 50,005 words on November 30th, with basically just the novel’s big climax scene to go, and just... stopped. So close, but I just couldn’t make myself finish it on December 1st. I didn’t like it.

In 2009, I hit November 30th and 54,350 at about the 2/3 point in the novel, coincident with a part in the storyline I hadn’t planned out as carefully as other parts. I kind of lost steam through December and the holidays, and somehow, just never got back to it. But I still love that story, and I insist I’ll come back to it one day.

In 2010, I won NaNoWriMo with 53,587, again just shy of the novel’s climax. And trust me, it’s going to be an awesome climax. But last year my book doctoring business was really taking off, so when December came around I had to get back to my client work, and there went my evening writing time.

Blah, blah, blah. It’s always something. Those aren’t reasons for not finishing so much as excuses. I may just as well say “the dog ate my thumb-drive.”

Stephen King said something in On Writing that I can’t quote verbatim from memory, but goes something like this: the reason writers establish writing routines is because finishing things is a habit, and not finishing things is a habit, too. I have gotten myself into a pretty bad habit, here.

So this year, I am determined not only to win NaNoWriMo—I’ve got that habit squarely established. I know exactly what it takes to get to 50,000 words—but to finish as well.

This year, I have a plan.

I’ve always been a plotter. I can’t start NaNoWriMo without a solid outline for my story. It’s a defense against writer’s block, really, but hey. Whatever it takes, right? I can write my way to 50,000 words no problem, so long as I’ve got that plot outline to follow. What I’m apparently lousy at doing, though, is gauging how many words it will take me to convert that outline into a story.

Well, not words. The words aren’t the problem. It’s more like I’m not good at knowing how many scenes it will take. My natural scene length is around 2000 words, which is basically a day’s work, so when a section in my outline I thought would be one scene turns into three, suddenly I’m behind. Not behind in word count, but behind in pacing the novel to the month of November.

So this year, since I’ve got 30 days to work with, I’m plotting out the novel in 30 scenes. One scene per day. That should work, right? NaNoWriMo has this big conception of being done on November 30th. As an event, that’s when it ends. Over. Finished. Maybe your brain works differently (and I hope for your sake that it does), but for me the relief of being done with NaNoWriMo and having reached that 50,000 word goal seems to translate into a feeling of being done with the writing, too. Even if I’m not actually done with the writing. Then, come December 1st, it’s hard to get back in that groove.

But one important lesson NaNoWriMo has taught me, from the first three years when I was somehow able to finish the novel in December, was that writing a novel is hard work and to do it, you grab on to any source of motivation you can find to help you keep going. Anything at all.

Perhaps public shame will do it. I’m desperate, folks, so I’m putting this on my blog to keep myself honest. I’m pledging, out in the public sphere, to keep myself honest and get this puppy done this time. If it works, I’ll hit 50k without any trouble, and should actually finish the damn novel on November 30th.

That, pardon the pun, will be a novel experience. I wonder what it will feel like?

How about you? Now that I’ve spilled my guts, share your NaNoWriMo experiences down in the comments!

September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. Last year, I blogged my thoughts on book banning. This year, I’ve picked seven books from the ALA’s list of frequently challenged classics, and will explain over the week why those books are awesome. Also, I have a copy of each book, and will be giving them away to seven lucky winners! Read to the bottom for details.

If you’ve been living under a rock: Go Ask Alice is ostensibly the anonymously published diary of a teenager in the hippie-era ‘60s who, seeking nothing more than to fit in with her peers, ends up falling into a life of drug use, casual sex, prostitution, and eventually dies of a presumed overdose. In actuality, the book is fiction, and is attributed to a woman named Beatrice Sparks.

Why it gets banned: Drug use, pre-marital underage sex, prostitution, why do you think it got banned?

Why that’s dumb: As with so many of the books in this series, the expressed desire to protect children from harmful influences in books is ridiculous. The harmful influences aren’t in books. They’re in the world. Books only reflect what’s in the world and provide kids with opportunities to explore various ideas and life choices vicariously. That is, in a safe manner. Books give kids an opportunity to think about these things and ask themselves “is that the choice I want to make for myself,” without exposing themselves to the risk of making those choices. You don’t protect anybody by banning a book. All you do is force kids to learn those lessons the hard way, with real consequences.

Why this book is awesome: Of all seven titles on this list, Go Ask Alice is easily the most personal choice for me. The others I chose largely because of their standing as works of literature or because of the issues they tackle. I chose this one because of how it has affected my life. Warning, I’m going to get personal here, and if that bugs you, you should click your back-button now.

I was a teenager in the ‘80s. On the one hand, that decade showed me a world where movie stars and musicians—the cool people—smoked a lot of dope and snorted a lot of coke. The kids in my high school drank a lot of beer and, when they could get away with stealing it from their parents’ liquor cabinets, the hard stuff. This was the decade that invented Jello shots, which were all the rage at those weekend cool-kids parties. On the other hand, the chief voice against drugs in those years was that crazy, scary-looking, First Lady and astrology maven Nancy Reagan. She was the last person I’d ever want to listen to.

Just the same, I had no interest in drugs or alcohol. None. They revolted me. But, to fit in, I would have had to do those things. At that age, I didn’t understand why I felt that way about narcotics, why my internal compass pointed so strongly in the direction most opposite to what every element of both popular- and peer-culture would have me do.

If you’ve ever been a teenager, or if you are one now, you know how strong the desire to fit in can be.

Then I found Go Ask Alice in the public library, where I had to wait every afternoon after school for my parents to pick me up for the long drive out to where we lived. I didn’t have a library card, so I didn’t check it out, but I’d read a little bit every day. I’d find it, read, and carefully re-shelve it when it was time to go.

I know, now, that the book is fiction. But when I read it then, I thought it was real. What kid reads the fine print on the copyright page to double-check who the Library of Congress credits as the author? I thought it was real, and the book spoke to me. In the anonymous Alice’s circumstances and choices, what I found was affirmation for what I felt inside me. What I found was confirmation for my own instincts that drugs were a bad deal, and if everybody else wanted to do them then I guess that was their business, but I didn’t have to make that same choice. (Note: I really do believe that. If you want to take drugs, that’s your own personal business and I’m not going to condemn you for it. They’re just not for me.)

I eventually came to understand why my compass points the way it does. It was because of some horrible shit that happened to me when I was Scout Finch’s age, stuff that happened because of drugs I didn’t even take, stuff I couldn’t even remember until several years after reading Go Ask Alice. But in some nebulous way I can’t really explain, Go Ask Alice (and later, the movie My Own Private Idaho) gave me a kind of map through the minefield I was traversing.

That book, whether fact or fiction, gave me the strength to keep myself safe through those difficult years. Of course I can never know what would actually have happened if I’d never found that book. But neither can I escape the feeling that if I hadn’t found it, I likely wouldn’t have survived. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but that’s how I feel. This book is awesome because it saved my life.

I have a copy of this slim volume tucked away on our bookshelves at home. I hope my kids never need it. But if they do, I want it to be there for them.

Win this book! Besides pontificating, what could be a more fitting response to Banned Books Week than to give away copies of these books? I’m giving these seven books, one per winner, to randomly selected people who share this post on Twitter. Just click the Tweet this! link at the bottom of the post. I will announce the winners on Monday, October 3rd.

If you’re just joining us, here’s the rest of the posts:

• Saturday: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)

• Sunday: The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951)

• Monday: Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953)

• Tuesday: Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)

• Wednesday: To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)

• Thursday: Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut, 1963)

• Today: Go Ask Alice (Anonymous, 1971)

September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. Last year, I blogged my thoughts on book banning. This year, I’ve picked seven books from the ALA’s list of frequently challenged classics, and will explain over the week why those books are awesome. Also, I have a copy of each book, and will be giving them away to seven lucky winners! Read to the bottom for details.

If you’ve been living under a rock: I suppose it is slightly less surprising if you’re not familiar with this book. It is not Vonnegut’s most well-known work. But, for my money, it is his best. It is ostensibly the chronicle of a writer’s quest to write a book documenting what various Important People were doing the day the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. In the process, the writer (who is known only as “John") travels to interesting places, meets interesting people, and encounters interesting ideas. And witnesses ... well, I could tell you but that would be a spoiler.

Why it has been banned: Cat’s Cradle was banned in 1972 by an Ohio school district board, along with three other titles. This decision was later overturned by the 1976 court decision in Minarcini v. Strongsville City School District. Information on why this book was targeted by the school district is sparse, but my entirely non-expert reading of the court case suggests that it was thrown out along with another Vonnegut title, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, which one of the board members’ secretary read for half an hour and found to be “completely sick,” and “GARBAGE.” There is no particular indication that anyone on the school board, nor anyone who reported to the school board, ever even looked at Cat’s Cradle. I can only surmise that this particular baby was thrown out along with Rosewater’s bath.

Had they actually looked at it, I can guess that they might have taken offense at the depictions of sex in the book, laughably tame though they are. From a certain humorless, avidly pro-America / pro-military-industrial-complex perspective, I can also imagine that one might take offense at Vonnegut’s clearly anti-war stance.

Why that’s dumb: Banning a book you haven’t even looked at? Do I really need to explain why that’s dumb? And if it was banned for descriptions of sex that consist of people touching the soles of their feet together, then I can only ask “what, exactly, are you hoping to achieve there?”

Why this book is awesome: This is my favorite of Vonnegut’s works because, at least to my eye, its philosophy is the most interesting. The book posits a fictional religion, Bokononism, based on the sayings of its prophet, Bokonon. These sayings are savagely funny, in a way that the word “wry” can only dream of hinting at, and are self-contradictory to a nearly Zen degree. Yet, buried within them are both lovely and tragic insights into people, how people treat one another, and the deep hypocrisies therein. I have to love a book which pokes society in its collective eye with its own double-standards.

The book is also a fabulous example of the minor-character narrator technique, in as much as John does not strongly interact with the course of events in the plot. He is a witness. A chronicler. A vehicle for observations about life. In this, John stands alongside Moby Dick’s Ishmael and The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway.

Win this book! Besides pontificating, what could be a more fitting response to Banned Books Week than to give away copies of these books? I’m giving these seven books, one per winner, to randomly selected people who share this post on Twitter. Just click the Tweet this! link at the bottom of the post. I will announce the winners on Monday, October 3rd.

If you’re just joining us, here’s the rest of the posts:

• Saturday: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)

• Sunday: The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951)

• Monday: Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953)

• Tuesday: Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)

• Wednesday: To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)

• Today: Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut, 1963)

• Friday: Go Ask Alice (Anonymous, 1971)

September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. Last year, I blogged my thoughts on book banning. This year, I’ve picked seven books from the ALA’s list of frequently challenged classics, and will explain over the week why those books are awesome. Also, I have a copy of each book, and will be giving them away to seven lucky winners! Read to the bottom for details.

If you’ve been living under a rock: Told through the innocent eyes of his six-year old daughter Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch, his defense of a black man accused of raping a white woman, and the turmoil that the case creates within the “tired old town” of Maycomb.

Why it gets banned: I could basically repeat most of the reasons why Huckleberry Finn gets banned for this book too. Language, of course. The book contains such profanities as “damn” and “whore lady,” as well as racial slurs and other such verbal barbs as were an integral part of the fabric of southern speech during the Great Depression. But to me, this reason why the book was challened at the Warren, IN Township schools in 1981 pretty much takes the cake:

[The book] represents institutionalized racism under the guise of good literature.”

Why that’s dumb: I’ve talked about offensive language more than once in this series, and won’t do so again here. As to institutionalized racism, well duh, that’s what good literature is for! Among other things, of course, good literature should represent the ugly parts of society exactly so we can talk about them, recognize their ugliness, and work to fix them. Huckleberry Finn was treated the same way and for the same reasons. The Catcher in the Rye got criticized for exposing society’s underbelly of hypocrisy. Same with Lolita, only for talking about pedophilia instead.

It’s always the same. Good literature should challenge us with the things we do wrong, so we can stop doing that. One of these days, somebody’s going to write a great novel with global warming as its theme—how we’re being poor stewards of the earth, how unfair it is for today’s generations to mess the planet up for tomorrow’s, et cetera—and I promise you that at some point, somewhere, somebody’s going to challenge that book for “representing global warming under the guise of good literature.” When that happens, it will mean the book is doing its job.

Why this book is awesome: This is a personal reason, but I love this book simply for the way it’s written. Harper Lee captures the voice of young Scout Finch so beautifully. A great novel lets you live for a while inside somebody else’s skin, and the voice of that character is the primary tool by which this happens. Harper Lee did such a masterful job with Scout Finch that she fits the reader like a glove.

I also love this book for its bittersweet, yet entirely believable ending. Having written my share of manuscripts, I know that can’t have been an easy thing to do. It took courage to write the ending like she wrote it, and I don’t know that I’d have had the courage to do the same thing. It would have been easy to reach for the happy ending, for the ending in which good triumphs over evil, and the cancer of institutional racism that yet ran strong in the 1960s was given a way to avoid looking at itself in an un-distorted mirror. I can only imagine that Harper Lee must have been tempted, at least a little bit, to end it that way.

But it wouldn’t have been the right ending. It wouldn’t have been the honest choice. I salute Harper Lee for her bravery and can only hope that if I’m ever faced with a similar choice in one of my novels, that I remember the lesson of To Kill a Mockingbird. Then I’ll know what to do.

Win this book! Besides pontificating, what could be a more fitting response to Banned Books Week than to give away copies of these books? I’m giving these seven books, one per winner, to randomly selected people who share this post on Twitter. Just click the Tweet this! link at the bottom of the post. I will announce the winners on Monday, October 3rd.

If you’re just joining us, here’s the rest of the posts:

• Saturday: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)

• Sunday: The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951)

• Monday: Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953)

• Tuesday: Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)

• Today: To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)

• Thursday: Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut, 1963)

• Friday: Go Ask Alice (Anonymous, 1971)

September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. Last year, I blogged my thoughts on book banning. This year, I’ve picked seven books from the ALA’s list of frequently challenged classics, and will explain over the week why those books are awesome. Also, I have a copy of each book, and will be giving them away to seven lucky winners! Read to the bottom for details.

If you’ve been living under a rock: Unless you got an English Lit degree in college, chances are Lolita is the only Vladimir Nabokov novel you can name without looking anything up. It is the story of one Humbert Humbert, an emotionally stunted man in his 40s who falls in love with his landlady’s young daughter. The daughter, Lolita, bears an uncanny resemblance to the one great love of Humbert’s life, the girl he was in love with when he was himself twelve years old but who died. The book is written from Humbert’s unflinchingly honest and self-appraising first person point of view.

Why it has been banned: Come on. The protagonist wants nothing more than to get freaky with a 12 year old girl. In one of the least surprising reactions to a literary work ever, the book was assailed right out of the gate as being lewd, indecent, immoral, and obscene, downright pornographic. It has been challenged ever since. France banned it in 1956, and the commissioners of Marion County, Florida, challenged the book in the county’s public libraries in 2006. How many books can boast a half-century of challenge?

Why that’s dumb: Suggesting that Lolita somehow condones pedophilia is entirely foolish, and anybody who says this to you is basically admitting that they either haven’t read the book, or else is willfully misunderstanding it. The book leaves no ambiguity that Humbert Humbert knows his proclivities are immoral, and he loathes himself for it.

A book whose protagonist is a pedophile is not going to somehow turn readers into pedophiles, any more than a movie like The Blind Side is going to turn me into a football player. Banning the book will do nothing to stop the horrible problem of child sexual abuse. It is worse than a laughable motivation. In thinking that banning a book is going to do any good, society gets to point to such efforts as examples of action being taken while the real problem goes unaddressed. And while it does, real children get hurt.

Neither will banning the book shield children from unpleasant truths: The book’s intentionally uber-literary style likely renders it all but incomprehensible to kids anyway. Unless you’re helping your sheltered child read and understand the almost paranoid level of metaphor used to convey the story, they’re not going to have any idea what it’s really about.

Why this book is awesome: I won’t say this isn’t a difficult book to read. It is, and indeed, parts of it I found difficult and distasteful to read. Which I’m sure was Nabokov’s intention. It isn’t a light and airy place, stepping however fictionally into the mentality of a child abuser. Recently, I saw this quote about the book (source):

Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert is a pedophile, a monster as vile as could possibly be imagined. Yet he still has agency, and his choices—reprehensible as they may be—never fail to provoke a reaction on our parts.

Which, I think, is exactly the point. Nabokov challenges his readers to look at Humbert’s actions, at Humbert’s motivations and the justifications for them, and make a choice. He demands we make a moral judgment. Is this right or wrong? At least for me, answering that question was not difficult. Considerably easier than reading the book itself, anyway.

The book is also awesome simply for its writing. Lolita is a great example of high literary style. I don’t honestly think this sort of writing flies in the modern marketplace (outside of rare counterexamples such as Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union). The writing is dense and difficult—a fact enhanced by Nabokov’s presumption that readers are fluent in English, French, and Latin—and I think few would argue that modern readers are looking for something a little faster to get through. Still, if you’re looking for a book to study for examples of vivid descriptions, spot-on turns of phrase, colorful and evocative metaphors, and other such devices, look no further.

In terms of story structure, it is also a good example of the extended flashback structure, in which the book starts at the story’s chronological end, then jumps back to the beginning, and we catch up from there. It is notoriously difficult to use this structure in conjunction with mysteries, because it’s hard for that opening not to give away too much. Yet, Nabokov does exactly that. Humbert labels himself a murderer in the book’s opening paragraphs, yet the story retains all the mystery it needs to keep us wondering about the murder.

Look. I know I’ll probably catch some heat for putting this book on my list. So be it. One of the jobs of literature is to confront us, both individually and collectively, with the best and worst in ourselves. Only by taking an honest, if difficult, look at ourselves can we move forward. In that light, Lolita is also awesome for having done its part to bring a traditionally hidden, taboo crime out into the light. Pedophilia is still pretty much a taboo subject, but Nabokov is to be praised for having taken a significant and early step to breach that taboo. To the extent that Lolita has done much to bring awareness, discussion, and advocacy about child sexual abuse issues into the public spotlight, the book has left the world a better place. As far as I’m concerned, that counts as awesome.

Win this book! Besides pontificating, what could be a more fitting response to Banned Books Week than to give away copies of these books? I’m giving these seven books, one per winner, to randomly selected people who share this post on Twitter. Just click the Tweet this! link at the bottom of the post. I will announce the winners on Monday, October 3rd.

If you’re just joining us, here’s the rest of the posts:

• Saturday: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)

• Sunday: The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951)

• Monday: Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953)

• Today: Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)

• Wednesday: To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)

• Thursday: Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut, 1963)

• Friday: Go Ask Alice (Anonymous, 1971)

September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. Last year, I blogged my thoughts on book banning. This year, I’ve picked seven books from the ALA’s list of frequently challenged classics, and will explain over the week why those books are awesome. Also, I have a copy of each book, and will be giving them away to seven lucky winners! Read to the bottom for details.

If you’ve been living under a rock: In a dystopian future of mindless television slaves, where the very act of thinking has been criminalized and firemen have been turned to the task of burning books, once stalwart party-line man Guy Montag meets a girl and has a change of heart.

Why it has been banned: The usual ridiculous reasons such as language ("hell” and “damn” and other such swears that seem laughably mild by modern standards, but weren’t so mild in 1953), but also because the Bible is among the books burned in Bradbury’s dystopia.

Why that’s dumb: Banning this book for swearing is, of course, laughable for exactly the same reasons as for The Catcher in the Rye; kids encounter these words from numerous sources well before they ever see them in a book like this. Saying that it is somehow the job of writers and other artists to put forth a version of the world that is sanitized to everyone’s liking is equally foolish. It is the job of writers and other artists to put forth the world as it is, that we may see it better, because it is the job of each and every one of us to improve the world into what it should be.

Also, no one who has actually read Fahrenheit 451 while paying attention would buy into the notion that Ray Bradbury was advocating burning Bibles. Quite the opposite: Bradbury was showing readers of the Cold War, McCarthy-era ‘50s what the logical extension of that kind of hysterical thought policing would lead. Burning Bibles represents how bad that brand of authoritarianism could get. Bradbury, quite clearly, isn’t in favor of burning any books, religious ones or otherwise.

And also, can I just take a moment to point out the ridiculous irony of attempts to censor a book that is fundamentally about the evils of censorship?

Why this book is awesome: Censorship is an attack on all of us. Each and every one. The rights to think what we like, to express what we think, and to share those ideas are the most sacrosanct and inviolable. There is a reason why the First Amendment is first in the Bill of Rights.

What do I care if someone wants to ban James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that I will admit to having no interest in and will likely never read? I care, or I should, because if that ban is successful then I am that much closer to being prevented from reading something I do want to read. And I am that much closer to having my own ideas censored.

Fahrenheit 451 is awesome not only because Bradbury takes a stand against censorship, exposing it for the morally bankrupt concept that it is, but because in it Bradbury shows us a vision of what lies at the end of that path, once we start taking steps along it. Don’t take that route, he tells us. You won’t like what you find there.

Win this book! Besides pontificating, what could be a more fitting response to Banned Books Week than to give away copies of these books? I’m giving these seven books, one per winner, to randomly selected people who share this post on Twitter. Just click the Tweet this! link at the bottom of the post. I will announce the winners on Monday, October 3rd.

If you’re just joining us, here’s the rest of the posts:

• Saturday: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)

• Sunday: The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951)

• Today: Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953)

• Tuesday: Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)

• Wednesday: To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)

• Thursday: Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut, 1963)

• Friday: Go Ask Alice (Anonymous, 1971)