Category: NaNoWriMo

Posted on

Feel the chemistry: creative writing set in a pharmacy

As most of you will be aware if you’ve been following the updates on our Facebook group, I’m currently working on a novel for NaNoWriMo 2022, and my main character’s family runs a chemist’s shop much like this one:

By something ever-so-slightly less than a coincidence, our latest assignment is to write something set in (or connected with) a chemist’s shop or pharmacy. That way, although it seems highly likely I won’t quite reach the NaNo target of producing 50,000 words in one month, at least I’ll be able to say I’ve completed my Island Writers assignment!

Or so I thought!

Sadly, my NaNo novel’s plot hit a snag, so I have now declared myself a NaNoRebel – I’m trying to continue writing and aim for the same word count, but I’ve switched to another project: a memoir of my childhood.

Will I manage to include a chemist’s shop? I doubt it, but we’ll have to see.

So, what can be done with that topic? A chemist’s shop sells two main product lines: health and beauty.

Health

The pharmacy dispenses medicines from the doctors’ prescriptions, while off-the-shelf health products include vitamins and supplements, plasters and bandages, ointments and treatments for minor ailments, as well as products such as toothpaste.

The characters in your story might include ill people, particularly those who wish to avoid seeing their doctor, but are quite willing to spread their infections to others. Keeping people waiting while their prescriptions are dispensed might cause an interesting source of conflict between customers or staff. Alternatively, a customer may be pregnant, which could cause an emergency – or an embarrassing situation. The shop staff might be asked to help with advice or treatment for an injury to a passer-by, or a customer might decide to interfere and offer other customers inaccurate health advice.

Beauty

Beauty products include skin creams, cosmetics, hair dye, foot treatments, nail polish, hair remover and other self-grooming items.

These characters would be people who want to enhance their appearance, either because they’re ugly, or because they’re already beautiful. But does their self-perception reflect reality?

Do they understand how to use the product correctly, or listen to the sales assistant’s advice? Does the beauty product improve their looks, or spoil them? How does the change in their outer appearance affect their happiness, or alter the way they treat other people?

This might be an opportunity to write a memoir of your teenage years rather than a short story or poem. Or perhaps a piece of science fiction or fantasy, where the medication or beauty product causes an otherworldly change.

—

Remember, as this month has five Tuesdays, we’re catching up for a friendly drink at Yelf’s Hotel in Ryde (with or without your partner, whichever you prefer) on Tuesday 29 November, 7pm onwards.

The next Island Writers meeting is Tuesday 6 December.

Posted on

Breathless expectations of creative writing

Those of you who have been paying attention may have noticed that my daily NaNoWriMo updates have gone from a sprint to a jog to an uphill plod, and finally come to a breathless standstill. I’m pleased with the 6,000 words I managed to write, but I wasn’t sure where the book was going after that.

I’m not too disheartened. Writing a 50,000-word novel in a month is not easy, so instead, I’ve spent the rest of the month adding bits to existing projects and eating way too much chocolate! But it’s made me determined to prepare more effectively next time – perhaps I’ll try Camp NaNo next April.

In the meantime, we have an extra Tuesday in November, which means tomorrow (Tue 30 Nov) we will be Yelfing – social drinks and chat in Yelf’s Hotel, Ryde, 7pm onwards.

This also means we get an extra week to complete the latest Island Writers assignment: Breathless.

This could be about a person struggling to breathe due to unfitness or some form of strenuous exercise – both of which applied to me as I thought up the subject while rushing home for our last meeting!

‘Breathless’ might also be construed to mean ‘not breathing,’ either referring to a dead person or animal, or a creature which does not breathe – a statue, a toy or even an alien.

Alternatively, it might refer to a shocked gasp, or the ‘breathless hush’ as people hold their breath, expecting something amazing to happen, or waiting for the outcome of an important or potentially dangerous action.

Next meeting: Tue 7 Dec at our house in Ryde – use Contact page for more info.

Will I have finished my assignment by then? Don’t hold your breath!

Posted on

Have you locked creative writing out of your life?

WHAM!

Lockdown was quite a shock to the system. Almost overnight, it took us away from our jobs, distanced us from our families and friends, and cancelled most of our hobbies.

It wasn’t easy, but human nature is resilient. So, after a while, we got used to these tiresome social restrictions and created different patterns of living for ourselves. Some of us even preferred our new, relaxed lifestyles, chilling at home in our PJs instead of struggling through the rush hour, and spending more time with the kids, with a cast-iron excuse not to visit our annoying in-laws. As for our creative writing… well, much as we loved it, we had to put that on the back burner until we got the other stuff sorted out.

Now, we’re crawling back towards normality… but wait. Isn’t there something we’ve overlooked? Has our writing been simmering on the back burner for so long, that it’s almost boiled away? It’s become something we used to do, instead of something we do?

It’s time for action: time to do something positive to get our creative urge back.

For writers of memoirs or family history, an afternoon spent looking through old photographs or a visit to a place that has links with the past could be a spur to get writing again. For playwrights (failing a theatre trip), watching a film we haven’t seen before could start us off again, or watching an old favourite, but with a critical eye for its construction.

For short story writers and poets, being an active member of a writers’ group gives accountability, a reason to actually do some writing instead of just feeling guilty that we haven’t. Island Writers meets at our house in Ryde twice a month to do short writing exercises, share our work and keep ourselves on track, and we set a new (optional) topic every two weeks. The current topic is Badges, and the next meeting is Tuesday 5th October, 7pm-9pm.

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is coming up in November – so for those of us who prefer to write novels, Nano Prep can help us get revved up and ready to write. It’s already started, but it’s not too late to catch up, or we can use it as guidance, but follow the steps at our own pace – the important thing is to get going.

Instead of tinkering around with an existing bit of writing, adding a word here and deleting a phrase there, let’s get started on a fresh piece. Any subject, any genre, any length. Try one of these:

  • A journal entry – what you’ve done so far today.
  • A story which starts, “The dragon was restless.”
  • A list of reasons why your neighbour is a pain.
  • A poem about cheese.
  • A description of one item in the room you’re in.
  • A memoir of something naughty you did as a child.
  • A piece of dialogue between a posh person and someone who works for them.

Whatever we decide, it’s vital to remember that all new writing is good. If we’re not happy with it, we can edit it later, but first, let’s get some new writing down on paper.

Today.

Posted on

NaNoFinMo – swimming the wrong way?

NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is the annual challenge to spend November writing a novel. But it tends to leave most of its participants realising that what they’ve written is, well, part of a novel, even if they’ve reached the target of 50,000 words written in one month. Even those who complete their novels still need to edit them. Now, NaNoFinMo has been created to encourage writers to get those part-novels finished, edited and ready for publication; it stands, of course for National Novel Finishing Month.

The NaNo website only allows targets to be set in words, not in chapters, pages, or other values, so I chose an arbitrary target of 1000 words a day. Pretty achievable, you might think, considering that the original challenge was to write 2000 words a day.

By Day 8, I had realised my mistake.

Editing is not like writing the first draft. Yes, I had extra words to write to complete the book, but their quantity wasn’t important: they had to be the best words, not the most words. I needed to feel free to delete words, sentences and paragraphs – maybe even entire chapters if necessary – without worrying about reaching a pre-assigned word count. An effective day’s editing could easily result in a negative word count figure, but that’s fine, if the finished book is the better for having cleared out the trash.

During NaNoWriMo, I had found that posting daily updates on the Island Writers Facebook page helped to encourage me to put in a full day’s effort, and I enjoyed choosing appropriate pictures from Pixabay to illustrate my mood or level of achievement. So I didn’t want to give up the idea of posting my targets during NaNoFinMo (which, to match the shark’s ‘Fin’ in the title, were all water-themed).

So, taking an average of my actual word counts from the first week, I cut my official target to 500 words a day, to try to keep myself on track. However, my unwritten target was to edit one chapter every two days, thus completing my 15-chapter novel in 30 days.

Did it work? Sad to say, no.

The first thing I did wrong was not planning and preparing properly. I made a last-minute decision, and I still had some important paperwork which took up my time, but needed to be sorted out urgently.

And then, a warm, sunny April was the wrong time of year to force myself to stay shut away indoors. In the early part of the month, I was too willing to let other distractions and responsibilities take preference. After all, I had plenty of time. There were so many jobs I needed to get done in the garden, and because of the fine weather, I made the decision to prioritise them.And then, on the 12th, the lockdown restrictions were partly relaxed, so we had several medical appointments and other social commitments.

More importantly, my revised target was still a numerical daily word target – still not the right kind of target. Nor was the unofficial chapter-every-two-days target helpful, as some of the chapters were almost complete, some needed rewriting, some were hardly started and one I decided to scrap entirely, while some of the editing involved rearranging the order of what I’d written, and breaking some parts up into different chapters.

Unfortunately, by simply not worrying about whether I managed to reach the word total, I had unwittingly removed my main motivator for finishing my book: my daily ‘reward’ to myself of choosing a photo from Pixabay to present each day’s update. Far from helping it all to go swimmingly, as I’d hoped, I was floating off in the wrong direction, and rewarding myself whether I’d worked hard at my editing or not.

What I should have done, I realise now, is set a target for the amount of time spent editing. And when I say, ‘editing,’ I don’t mean checking my emails, looking at cat pictures on Facebook, reading articles in Writing Magazine, making a sandwich, putting a wash in the machine, buying stuff on Ebay, mowing the lawn, typing up the agenda from a meeting, mending my chair because it’s a bit wobbly, watering my plants, answering questions on Quora, or emptying the recycling bin. Because, apparently, none of those improved my book at all. Who knew, right?

But I’m not downhearted.

During this month, I wrote over 9000 extra words for my novel, which is a lot more than I’d normally have achieved. I’ve also managed to tweak it and pummel it into a much more effective shape – it’s getting there!

Many thanks to Katie and the other members of the Island Writers Facebook group who have left supportive comments and ‘likes’ to encourage me on my NaNoFinMo journey.

Posted on

NaNoFinMo: finishing my novel in bite-size chunks

Lurking under the surface of my conscious thought, my unfinished novel from National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) last November has been making me feel thoroughly guilty. I wrote 50,000 words in one month! It was a huge effort, and yet I still have nothing to show for it.

But now, NaNoFinMo is giving me (I hope) the impetus to sort out the yarn from the spindrift and get my novel ready to self-publish. By setting myself an easy, bite-size target of just 1000 words a day, I can get my teeth into the job, and finish the editing in a snap by the end of this month.

Follow my progress on the Island Writers Facebook Group page.

Posted on

Writing some NaNoWriMo magic

Every year, as November approaches, I have the same question in my mind: shall I have a try at NaNoWriMo this year? And I’ve decided that this year, with even fewer reasons to go out, is the perfect opportunity.

National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo to the initiated – takes place every November, and to ‘win,’ participants have 30 days to write 50,000 words of a novel. Planning the story and characters beforehand is allowed, but the official word count includes only what’s written during November.

With 30 days to reach the target, that’s a minimum of 1667 words a day. The hard part is deciding which words!

Impossible?

Not at all, as Island Writers member Yvie has proved – although it’s certainly not easy. She says one of her magic secrets for success was to set rewards for achieving 2000 words a day. Sounds good to me: any excuse for chocolate will do.

What I need now is a plot. Help! Thank goodness there are a couple of weeks before we start.

I’m reliably informed, by NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty’s book, No plot? No problem! that it doesn’t have to be a well-written, polished novel, or even a completed novel. Quality, in this challenge, is not nearly as important as quantity. The idea is to write at least 50,000 words of that daunting first draft, even if it’s a bit rough and ready, or indeed dire and pathetic. Which, believe me, is guaranteed in my case! Never mind: once NaNoWriMo is over, I can worry about polishing it up to a publishable standard.

I will post my daily progress on the Island Writers Facebook page – and I’m relying on you all to encourage me, cheer me on when I do well, and most importantly, mock me cruelly on any days when my result is under 2000 words, to shame me into increasing my efforts.

As you may know, I’m incurably competitive, so if anyone would like to join me, I’d welcome the challenge. Any takers? You can sign up in advance or at the last minute, on www.nanowrimo.org.

NaNoWriMo starts at the witching hour of midnight on Halloween, and ends at midnight on November 30th, and I will produce 50,000 words this time. Whether I will produce an enchanting novel is a different question – but it’ll be fun trying!