Stories start as a scratching, a tapping, a dripping faucet - something that niggles at us as we go about our day like a shadow that keeps shifting in our periphery. At least, this is how they start for me, and for most of the authors and writing students who've shared their processes with me. Something, whether beautiful or problematic or curious, will not leave us alone. 

So we turn our heads. We look in the direction of the shifting shadow and see a bit of a shape to it, and we write down what we see. 

Sometimes this leads to the next thing and the next thing. Those times are gifts, when the story reveals itself to us in full, continuously, as we sit with it and open ourselves to the words that bring it into the world.

Most times, we have fits and starts. The scratching creature gets skittish and scurries away the moment we've turned our attention toward it. We have a line or two, a page or two, and don't know where the little beast went or how to follow. We look for its tracks in the rooms and landscapes of our minds, and along the way, we see what it saw as it ran. 

Sometimes, we find it that same hour we started searching. Other times, it takes weeks, months, or even years. There are traces of story that started in me over 20 years ago, back when I was in high school, and I'm only now picking up their footprints. In the time since they first tickled at the edge of my conscious to now, I've written many, many other stories. And even in these, I've come to dead ends and missing trails at different moments along the journey.

Some of us call this writer's block. I have come to think of it as not being ready for the story, or for the particular part of the story, that we're writing. 

Stories are one of our most ancient containers for truth. When we didn't understand nature, or cruelty, or love, or time, we made myths to contain these truths so we could hold them up to the light and examine them outside ourselves. This helps us navigate the complexities of our own experience. 

But what if a story has a truth to tell that we don't yet know ourselves, as its writer? 

Here are some things we can do when we realize our story has outrun us:

• Take a break. This is a timeworn strategy, but worth remembering. If we step away for awhile, we might gain perspective that will open the dams again and let the story rush back through.
• Research. Even if your story is not history or science driven, even if it is in your home town on the same timeline as your life, you don't know everything about it. If you did, you wouldn't be writing it in the first place - we write to explore a problem, to get resolution. Look at the medicine, the geography, the different expectations of genders and ethnic groups, the urban legends, the "normal" of your story's world and people. 
• Is there a character you don't like? Read blogs and memoirs by people who have similar traits and learn what it's like to be them. These characters you dislike often have something to teach you, but they won't tell you your secrets knowing how much you hate them. Find a way to care about them, even just a little, and see how they suddenly explode into complex, breathing souls. You can still write them as unlikable, but now they will be multifaceted and believable, more capable of illustrating the core of the story.
• Is there a character you love too much? Oh, dear, this is hard. But we have to let them hurt, and we have to let them hurt because of their own flaws. If you work to hard to protect your character's image, no one will believe them anyway, and this perfect character, just like your villain, will stop talking to you. If you can't love someone, warts and all, they know better than to show you their warts. 
• Work on multiple projects at once. If you've taken a story as far as you can without doing the research and work above, it helps to take out other projects and give them more of your energy. In May, Joli Jensen wrote a fantastic article in The Chronicle about how to manage multiple projects according to your schedule and energy levels. Remember, in cases where deadlines aren't involved, it's OK to shift between which projects receive your strongest commitment when your A story goes silent on you. 
• Treat your stories like friends. Stories, like people, sometimes need space. Keep coming back to check on them, but respect the relationship. You can have more than one friend at a time, but it's unlikely you'll be engaged in deeply focused, intimate conversation with more than one or two of them in the same moment. Enjoy the time you spend with each of them, and invite the others over in their turn. Maybe one will teach you something that grows you enough to understand the truth in the others that you weren't ready to receive when it first came to you.
• Examine your demons. Even though most of my characters and their circumstances are not much like me, I often find them facing similar internal challenges to mine. Sometimes when I'm stuck, it's because I need to do some soul searching of my own before I can write a character honestly through their flaw. If you think this might be the case, I recommend doing some guided journaling. Many 12-step programs use the tool of a "fearless" personal inventory that can be adapted to addressing our demons as writers so that we can write our characters honestly as they address theirs.

What about you? Do you have other strategies for making yourself ready for the story that wants to be told? 

So here we all are, a week and a half into NaNoWriMo. Do you have 16,670 words written? I don't. I think I have about 3,000 words. And I feel successful AF. Here's why, and some things that might help if you're feeling less than successful today:

• Like kids, not all novels grow the same way. They learn to walk, talk, climb, and consider consequences at different times. There's a general expectation for these developments, but even kids who don't fall into the norms charts have something very special to offer. I once worked with a five-year-old whose piano teacher had given up on him at the age of two when he was able to transpose sheet music to a new key in his head and play it instantaneously. She said he was more advanced than she was, and she had nothing left to teach him. Why did I work with him? He didn't know how to interact with other five-year-olds. Let your novel grow at its own pace. If that means you don't have the same word count as you expect, figure out what you do have and rely on that strength to grow your draft. Wait till revisions to worry about the other stuff. 

 

• I knew from the beginning that I'm not a word count writer, so I didn't try to write by word count. My goal for this month has been to find entry points into a story that was too big for me. I've found three entry points already, and these characters' individual stories are growing beautifully. While I don't have 16,000+ words on the page, I do have some of the biggest challenges of the book solved already. On November 1, I did not. What do you have today that you did not have on November 1? How can you build the rest of the month around the way you do write instead of the way you don't?

 

• Jessica Wunder, one of my writer friends, says her goal this month is to keep pushing the story forward. She knows she lets herself nitpick, so she's forcing herself from scene to scene, and this is getting it done. I am the opposite. My novels don't grow from point A to point B. They are more like cell division: one cell becomes two, become four, become eight, and so on. The different bits grow simultaneously, so I grow my work by going back and expanding what exists. How does your work grow? Forward? Backward? By prompt? At the cellular level? If it's not growing, it may be because you're expecting a kind of growth that isn't natural to you or your work. Pause and consider when growth spurts have happened before. What do those look like? How can you create similar conditions for your writing now?

 

• Another writer friend, Leslie Salas, says she always leaves something unfinished at the end of a writing session. If she doesn't complete the scene, her brain will naturally pick at it while she's away from her writing, and it takes less time to warm up to the work the next time she sits down. If she finishes a scene, she makes sure to get a few sentences or questions into the next one before closing up shop for the day.

 

• If you're stuck, there are a few things you can do to take the pressure off and get unstuck. One is to step away from the work. Take a walk, bath, drive, whatever. But do something that gives your brain a break. If you're stuck because you don't know a character or setting or some other part of the book, open a new file, one that will never show up in the novel, and brainstorm. Write out scenes you don't intend to use. Write an interview with your character, or with three characters that aren't important to the book, but who know your character - one who likes them, one who doesn't, and a third of your choice. Ask yourself what scares you about the story. If nothing scares you, that's the problem. You're writing safe. That will bore you and the readers. Find a theme or idea that scares you and let your character wrestle with it. 

 

• Sit down next to another writer and be anti-social. Instead of visiting with each other, write. There's nothing like hearing another writer tapping away at their keyboard to get you motivated to tap away at yours.

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These are just a few things that I've found that work for me in writing in general, not just for Nano. If you have more tips to add to the comments, please do! 

NaNoWriMo is fast approaching, and if you're a fiction writer who wants to get a novel out of your system, you may be wringing your hands over it. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, happens every November as a communal push to get a novel on paper. The idea is simple: the average novel has 50,000 words, and November has 30 days. If you write ~ 1,667 words each day of the month, you'll have a first draft by the end of it. (If you want to know more, check out NaNoWriMo.org.)

I don't see myself as a word count writer. When I try that, it feels like I'm missing the relationship with my characters that I so love. I write to go deeper with people, to understand places I've never been, to open myself up to the possibility that I don't know everything. (More a fact than a possibility, but it's so easy for so many of us to forget this.)

And, I write out of order. The Former Lives of Buildings, the novel that I'm currently shopping around to agents, happens on four personal timelines of a character with memory problems, and was the first project where I fully embraced writing different threads of story and weaving them together in some kind of sequence later on. But all of my longer writing projects have jumped around as I've written them, leaving me to fiddle with scenes like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle during the revision process.

So, again, I don't see myself as that kind of writer, one who can just write the first 1,667 words one day and then sit down to write the next 1,667 words on the following day, for 30 consecutive days.

And, as a result, I haven't tried NaNoWriMo before. I have used the month to do a mad dash on revisions for novels, and that's worked well. But drafting a novel always seemed like a silly thing for me to try in this manner. 

But the world is crazy right now, and I need to create something while we're in the midst of all this destruction. I don't even care if I have a whole novel at the end of this. I just need to make something. 

So, here's what I'm going to do. The novel I've been researching for the past year has an ensemble cast spread across the globe, and it's felt too big for me to sink my teeth into all this time. But I've written a bit from this character, and a bit from that one, and I guess I have about 20 pages of bits. And that, I think, is how this book needs to get birthed: bit by bit. 

I'm going back to the classroom for this - I know consecutive, consistent word counts don't work for me. But prompts, the mainstay of the creative writing classroom, do. I am gathering articles, character prompts, inspiring photos, and other materials that can work as entry points to get at different characters in the book. Each day in November, I'll write from one of these prompts. I have a good feeling about this. I think it will give me all the threads I need to sit down and start weaving in the months that follow. 

What about you? Have you done NaNoWriMo before? Are you considering doing it for the first time? How have you prepared? How have you kept going in the midst of it? I'd love to hear about your experience.

Sidney Williams' workshops on monster building and using the reader's imagination to create horror were the best things I have heard to help me finish reworking one of my characters. Sidney concentrated on the idea of "Quiet Horror," the deep, infantile fears that grow from the unseen. Here are a few things I learned, which may be obvious to you if you're a horror writer or fan, but which really put into words what I needed to know for building horror into a literary-ish story:

Things vs. Their Shadows: Don't show the scary Thing if you can help it. Instead, let the atmosphere, characters' anticipation and imagination, and outcomes create the shadow of the Thing. Anticipation and possibility are more haunting than a 3-D, face-to-face encounter when it comes to monsters.

Don't Explain: It's good if the reader has to decide whether the character was right or wrong in this anticipation. If characters are reacting to well-founded superstitions or assumptions, readers may never need to be told if the characters were acting on correct superstitions and assumptions. The possibility that the character - and we, the readers, who followed the character - is wrong in these anticipations will make the story linger longer in the reader's mind. "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs is a great example.

Types of Fear: The goal is to get the character (and the reader) back to a place of infantile fear. Some fear categories are the unseen/unknown, pain, loss of control, and mortality.  

Sidney gave us a great list of examples of quiet horror, and I'm looking forward to reading them. Do you have favorite quiet horror stories or questions about horror writing in a non-horror genre? I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

Image: Credit, Attribution 2.0 Generic License