6 Writing Projects You Should Be Thinking About As Autumn Arrives
Another installment from my third week of lists, a clinging-to-the-trees, back-to-school-special, dreading-impending-winter edition all about words, words words, words, more words, and getting those words out of your brain in time for next year’s words: because they want out… they really do.
6 Writing Projects You Should Be Thinking About As Autumn Arrives
I will admit here: I kinda bailed on my big writing project already. Two things happened: first, I discovered that there was a new dramatic television series on the tubes this season with the same title as my working title. (Guess I need to watch more advertising, or something.) That’s not a project killer in itself, but it threw me off balance a little bit. Second, and slightly more ruinously, I discovered an indie book in the Kindle store — recommended to me, in fact, by the algorithm that recommends such books — and said book had the exact same plot as the story I was writing. I read the synopsis and thought: “hey, that sounds…. ah, crap!”
Plan B? Back to the blog, and wait for further inspirations. More writing drivel? Well, at the very least start the only-forward, sun-in-my-eyes, never-pausing-for-anything trot towards something new and fresh, most of which includes the six writing-related projects that I’m just in time to start seriously considering for the winter months, such as…
[ 1 ] Clearing Out the Summer Vacation Backlog
I clear out my clutter by writing snarky essays about “how I spent my summer vacation”…
If you write anything like me, and hopefully for your own sake that is not the case, you will have accumulated a seasonal backlog of writing to get done. You might not even know it. In fact, unless you are a navel-gazing, introspective dork like me you probably have not given much thought to the mental clutter that has piled up over the summer months… but it’s there. It’s waiting for you to pen it out, key it into the ether, or otherwise find ways to convert it into something besides the mental harvest bounty that awaits. And you just know that you’re not going to be able to get any serious new projects started until you address this issue: it’s not going away on it’s own, either. These are those projects you dreamed up while out on long summer walks (or runs), while sitting on the beach, cooking hot dogs over the campfire, tending your vegetable garden, driving down the long stretches of open road while on the family summer road trip, while sipping a beer in a slouching lawn chair as you tried to avoid eye contact with your relatives. I clear out my clutter by writing blogs like this, taking stabs at chaotic plots, and otherwise writing snarky essays about “how I spent my summer vacation” — and you don’t realize how useful this is as a fall cleaning until you give it a go.
[ 2 ] Updating Your Reading Wish List
It is a truth universally acknowledged single writer in possession of free time, must be in want of a good book to read. Writers read. Writers read lots. Fall is a great time to update your wish list: not only is it leading into that important gift-giving season when all sorts of new novels appear waiting to be bought up and put under the festivus pole in December, but having a actual, physical, read-able list will get you away from all those other distractions — like the new fall television season line-up — before you get yourself hooked on someone else’s plot-line and ignore both your reading homework and your own blossoming plots.
[ 3 ] Re-Examining Your Habits & Tools
…there is something primal about hunkering down for the winter…
We don’t think about renewal and refreshing our attitudes in Autumn. We’re usually pre-occupied with the dwindling of the summer months and the looming retreat of the greens into browns to make way for the winter snow. But Autumn is also a time for back to school… back to serious… new starts, new grades, new teachers. I’ve been out of school for so many years I barely remember this feeling, but even so: there is something primal about hunkering down for the winter, getting the harvest packed up and stored for the long dark nights, and preparing the mind for stretches of waiting out the cold. We are all likely going to have some time on our hands again soon: winter affords us this. And taking stock of our winter writing habits now gets us in the right frame of mind to actually produce something before spring rolls around again in six months. Such as…
[ 4 ] NaNoWriMo
And all of this seems somehow appropriate as we move into the first day of October knowing that in precisely one month would-be novelists will be hunkering down over keyboards all over the world (for what must surely be the tenth year by now) in an effort to write a fifty-thousand word NaNoWriMo novel for 2012. Still one of my favourite rants, last year I rebutted an anti-NaNo article and explained that while the result of ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of those efforts is admittedly bound to be sub-par crap, the effort itself is an admirable feat, akin to the running of a marathon… but with words. NaNoWriMo is a commitment, and every person who thinks they might want to be a writer, but has yet to pen anything noteworthy, should experience this commitment at least once. If nothing else, it is an interesting way to spend November.
[ 5 ] Editing Last Year’s NaNoWriMo
That said, if you wrote a NaNoWriMo novel last year (or *cough, cough* two years ago) and you have yet to run it through the editing process, Autumn is a great a time to get on this: the new year is coming and guess what? You are not only going to have a second unedited NaNoWriMo novel in your hands in about two months but come January first you might start thinking about doing something from the genre of…
[ 6 ] Year-Long Mega-Projects
Calendar years start just once a year. Sure this seems to be a frequent occurrence, but in reality no. If you miss this chance, you’ve got a whole three-hundred-and-sixty-five days before your next proper chance. There is something about beginning a mega-project, after all, on January One. It just doesn’t have the same ring to say you started on October One… or July sixteenth… you’ll forever need to wast time explaining your choice of date to the uninitiated instead of actually getting writing done. What is a mega project? Think daily or weekly word goals, a chapter-a-month for a year, or some other epic project that will take you one year of focused, concerted effort to get done. It is not for the faint of heart, sorry to say, but it’s autumn… it’s October first today… and you’ve got three months to plan that project out. Now’s the time, eh?
Why are you reading my blog? Go write something. Or share your own winter-writing maintenance tips in the comments below…
