No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (7 page)

—Alexandra Queen, 28, three-time NaNoWriMo winner from Ripon, California; Alexandra lives with a two-year-old.

“The only advice I have for anyone who writes with a little kid in the house is to do it when they’re not around. I suggest enlisting the help of a spouse/babysitter for the month, or planning to forgo sleep when the child is in bed. And TV. Lots of TV.”

—Laurie Jackson, 39, two-time NaNoWriMo winner from Colorado Springs, Colorado; Laurie lives with a six-year-old.

“Making the commitment to write a novel is probably the biggest obstacle. Then, making it a priority is the other. If I didn’t make it a priority for that day, it didn’t get done. And with children, it truly won’t get done if you aren’t a little selfish and take that time out of the day to write. My advice to other moms is that if you have a story, then tell it. I always believe it’s not just about us. It’s about the fact that someone in the world needs to hear what we have to say, and we are letting them down if we don’t write it.”

—Karla Akins, 42, one-time NaNoWriMo winner from North Manchester, Indiana; Karla lives with eight-year-old twins, a thirteen-year-old, and an eighteen-year-old.

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CREATING A NOVELING HEADQUARTERS AWAY FROM HOME

For those not chained to desktop computers, the world is a particularly succulent noveling oyster. Laptops, PDAs, and pens and paper allow writers to take advantage of a host of wonderful, creativityspiking writing milieus. For me, I have to get out of the house to write. Though I live alone, I find the peace and quiet at home insufferably distracting and the siren song of my bed irresistible. I also find that my apartment, with its off-the-beaten-path location and cumbersome series of locks, has a real dearth of interesting-looking strangers wandering in off the street looking for coffee.

Working in public gives you that and more. Obsessive email checking is curtailed, the mood is more lively, and buckets of caffeine are sitting there for the asking. Because I have the attention span of an aphid, I tend to seek out new writing environments pretty frequently, particularly ones that are open late. In my search for noveling novelty, I’ve driven out to the airport to spend the day writing in the concourses, had day-long writing sessions in the local IKEA cafeteria (fantastic views over the San Francisco Bay!), and worked out more than one chapter in the swank, anonymous recesses of downtown hotel bars.

Of all the environments for writing outside the home, though, I’ve found none more amenable than the cafe.

YOUR NOVEL (COMING SOON TO A COFFEESHOP NEAR YOU)

The allure of a coffeeshop for noveling is obvious: instant access to caffeine, comfortable seats, sturdy tables, and a nonstop stream of potential novel fodder walking by.

With wireless modems and powerful laptops so ubiquitous these days, the click of computer keys has become as common a coffeehouse noise as the whir of the milk steamer. The tech-friendly vibe of most cafes is great news for novel writers, and as you scope out cafes in your area keep an eye out for the following boons:

-Plenty of outlets!

If your laptop is as old as mine, the key strategy is jockeying for a good position near the cafe’s electrical outlets. A laptop uses a miniscule amount of power (about a cent per hour)—a cost you can karma-cly offset by supersizing your drink or getting something to nibble on while you write. If you feel comfortable doing it, a good way to get around an otherwise great spot’s shortage of outlets is to bring a powerstrip (or three-outlet extender) and an extension cord. I always keep both in my car in November for NaNoWriMo group writing sessions in coffeeshops (I also have a roll of electrical tape on hand in case the cord becomes a tripping hazard for other patrons).

-Students!

Where there are students, there is inevitably a greater-than-average tolerance for “camping,” the term staff use to describe people who set up shop at tables for hours at a time. Since your average writing session will probably be about two hours, you’d do well to find a place that won’t start giving you the hairy eyeball if you nurse that latte for a while.

-Quiet background music!

There’s a coffeeshop near my house in Oakland that has it all: convenient location, strong Java, comfy seats, and electrical outlets up the wazoo. The cafe, though, is always on the verge of going out of business. Why? Because the manager has a soft spot for lite rock at block-shaking volumes. Hall and Oates are painful at a murmur; turned up loud, they become a health hazard. Don’t waste your time trying to write in a place where you can’t concentrate.

As soulless as they can sometimes be, Starbucks coffeeshops are built for abuse by novelists; the music is usually surprisingly good (and inoffensively low) and all of them make a point of making outlets accessible to laptop users. And best of all, as long as you’re not setting anything on fire, the staff doesn’t care how long you stay.

LIBRARIES

Like coffeeshops, libraries are starting to become more hip to the needs of laptop users, adding both electrical outlets and ethernet cables to the traditional study carrels. Unlike cafes, libraries will let you stay as long as you like without buying anything. You also have the instant advantage/distraction of being able to do research as you write.

The library’s main drawback is usually an early closing time. If you live close to a university, though, chances are good there will be some college libraries that stay open until 11:00 P.M. or midnight. Call ahead to see if you need a student ID for entry.

WORK

As two-time NaNoWriMo winner Irfon Ahmad can tell you, not all press is good press. When the thirty-two-year-old Torontonian was quoted in a newspaper article about the city’s NaNoWriMo participants, his quiet literary project suddenly became a matter of public record at his office. With some surprising results.

“From that point onward,” Irfon says, “everybody at my company would ask me about my word count and how the novel was going every day. I could pretty much work on it openly as long as nothing with a really tight deadline was looming. I think that my boss would have been willing to excuse me from meetings to write if I’d have asked. He was very excited about the whole thing.”

While this sounds like a dream set-up for most of us, Irfon soon discovered the complicated nature of bringing personal projects into a working environment.

“It ended up acting as a huge deterrent from writing,” Irfon laments. “Because everybody assumed that I would slip company time to write, I went out of my way to prove that I was being productive, and I didn’t write at all during working hours. The year before, when I was being furtive about the whole thing, I probably wrote nearly a quarter of my novel at work.”

That, in a nutshell, describes the office: It’s a wonderful, horrible place to get work done. Its appeal as a novel workshop lies in the lengthy attendance it requires of us each week, and chances are good that while using the Time Finder in chapter two you drooled over all the red-underlined hours you spend at work every day. If you spent just a fraction of your workday typing on your novel, you’d be able to get the whole book written on company time.

Yet, as Irfon’s story indicates, work can be a surprisingly difficult place to get things done. The most ethically unencumbered route is to come in to work early or stay late. This also gives you the advantage of writing with fewer distracting co-workers around coming up to ask how your novel is going. Fellow Toronto resident Michele Marques, a thirty-nine-year-old one-time NaNoWriMo winner—who used a Palm PDA with a collapsible keyboard—found her company’s breakroom to be a fantastic place to write.

“I think the workplace cafeteria is greatly underrated,” Michele reports. “There’s good lighting, a flat surface, and a lunch hour. If you bring your lunch, you only have reheat and you’re ready to write.”

And then there’s the matter of actually noveling during working hours. The moral question of stealing company time to work on your novel is a toughie. If you do decide to novel during working hours, there are four practical pointers to keep in mind to make the writing as productive as possible.

-1) Tell few (if any) co-workers you’re writing the novel until you’re finished with it. As Irfon’s story proves, once word gets out about your literary feat-in-progress, everyone will start thinking you’re working on your novel even when you’re doing actual work.

-2) Know that, unless you are working with a complete lack of supervision, you can’t really relax into your story while you’re supposed to be working.

For this reason, imagination-intensive scenes where you need to improvise clever solutions to vexing plot problems will probably be all but impossible to pull off while you’re on the clock. If you know you will write at work, consider tackling the scenes you’ve already mapped out, so you’re simply coloring in the predetermined outlines.

-3) Never let your novel touch your work computer’s hard drive.

Keep your work on a floppy disk or a small “thumb drive” you bring to work with you. This way you won’t get confused with multiple versions of the same file, and you’ll be able to take it home with you easily at the end of the day and rejoin the bits you wrote with the main document. Also, keeping the file off your computer desktop makes it less likely a snooping boss will stumble across your masterpiece. Even saving your work on a floppy disk won’t completely cover up the tracks of your noveling. The file name and the fact that it originated from the floppy drive will show up in several places on your computer, including the drop-down “recently accessed documents” list on your word processor. Clear your novel file from this list by opening four or five other documents at the end of each day. And you can also make it look less suspicious by naming your novel file something innocuous like

“accouhtssummary.doc” or “presentationdraft.doc.”

-4) Be ready to toggle over to a “cover” file at all times.

A few well-timed keystrokes can send you smoothly from your personal document into the workapproved sanctuary of an Excel file Carole McBay, twenty-six, a three-time NaNoWriMo winner from London, recommends the potent alt-tab combination—which lets you escape to a different program. If you’re going to write at work, practice that keystroke at night until you can do it with the stealth and speed of a ninja.

-------------------DEDUCTING YOUR NOVELIST SHOPPING SPREE FROM YOUR TAXES

Want to save a bundle on your noveling notebook, pens, and reference novels? What about a discount on movie tickets and DVDs? A percentage off your rent or mortgage? Well, read on: As a novelist, you’re entitled to deduct all of your novel-writing expenses from your taxes. Maybe. I talked to Peter Abel, a CPA in Oakland, and asked him to explain the somewhat confusing criteria the IRS use when deciding what expenses amateur novelists can write off in the pursuit of their muse.

“If you’re an artist,” Peter says, “there is a great latitude in the things that you do in order to research your craft. The big issue is whether this is a hobby or whether this is a business.”

If, like many of us, you are writing your novel just for the fun of it, you are out of luck. But if you do intend to someday make money from your writing, get thee to a CPA right away. Everything that furthers your novel-writing efforts (“research” trips to Majorca, cable TV, a new computer with a wallsized plasma screen, etc.) can be deducted from your taxes, as long as you can prove you spent the money in an effort to produce a cash-generating manuscript.

According to Peter, the simplest way to prove your honorable mercantile intentions is to actually sell a book. Since the business of novel writing often consists of years of unprofitable struggle, the IRS

allows you to also deduct expenses so long as you document attempts at profitability. These include postal receipts from sending out manuscripts, copies of query letters you send to editors or agents, and logs of phone calls you made hounding your local publisher. Oh, and keep a written record of all your efforts, and pay for everything you can by credit card or check so you’ll have a proof of payment and a receipt. And know that claiming a deduction, especially deducting a home office, does increase your chances of being audited by a percentage point or two.

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QUIRKY PLACES

For twenty-eight-year-old Carolyn Lawrence, a two-time NaNoWriMo winner from Atlanta, the gym emerged as a surprisingly productive place to get work done.

“Treadmills always get my creative juices flowing,” she says, laughing. “Though most of the members of the gym now think that there is something seriously wrong with me, because I talked my plot out loud to myself while working out, all while I was wearing my headphones.”

However questionable the results can sometimes be, one of the joys of the noveling journey is applying your creativity to some conventionally uncreative spaces. Necessity is truly the mother of invention, and your tight deadline will transform formerly inert waystations into magical writing hubs. Take advantage of off-beat spaces; they can be a great way to keep your word-count high and your imagination stoked.

Oakland’s Tim Lohnes, the come-from-behind writer from chapter two, swears by cheap motel rooms as productive places to get writing done (he uses the Web to book last-minute hotel rooms in out-ofthe-way suburbs). A more intoxicating option is to write in your neighborhood pub. Two-time NaNoWriMo winner Amy Probst, thirty-six, of Detroit, Michigan, likes to drag her writing group to a local watering hole called the Senate.

Amy reports: “My fellow Detroit WriMos and I are fond of putting a mess of quarters in the jukebox down at the Senate for mandatory writing until the music stops. It’s good for inspiration. The bar has also provided us with incredible characters and dialogue from the regulars.”

I’ve had similar luck with a brewpub in Oakland. Located next to the Oakland Convention Center, the place is a ghost town after the conventioneers head back to their hotels in the evening. While I was a little nervous to show up at a bar as part of a nerdy writing posse (complete with computers), the staff turned out to be all too glad to have us there.