Whether you are a daily writer, or one that thinks you have a story in you, it’s time for you to get it out and on paper. Or computer. Or parchment. Or what ever you write on.

I have participated in NaNoWriMo for the past 5 years, but have yet to win. I put the blame on not really planning anything. I just dove in and started writing. And quickly running out of steam. But not this year. I actually have a plan.

I’ll be handwriting mine this year, as I have done in years past. I can’t write on the computer screen, as there are too many distractions (internet, email, forums, etc), so I find it easier to write with my fountain pen on paper.

I’ll be blogging my daily process, as well as updating my daily word count on the left bar. I may post snippets, but I doubt it.

So, let’s all have fun and start writing on Saturday.

“See them?” the old editor asked me. “If you’re going to write for newspapers, you’ve got to be able to take the most complicated things happening in the world and write about them clearly enough so that they can understand ’em.” Clarity. That’s a vital ingredient in any kind of writing. When you write, you’re taking ideas in your mind and trying to transfer them into the minds of people you’ll never meet, through the medium of making marks on paper. Clarity is important. Writing shouldn’t be a contest between writer and reader. The writer’s job is to make the reader understand what he’s writing about. [From Ben Bova: Writers must write, every day : Columns : Naples Daily News]

What struck me was how true this is when working on copy for clients websites. I don’t know how many times I have read the copy that I receive, or the copy that is on a small business website, and I don’t understand. If I don’t understand it, how does anyone expect a casual visitor to your site to understand it? They won’t.

In this age of instant gratification, what you write must be clear and understandable. Whether it’s a short story, memoir, novel, or even web copy for your internet site. As the editor states: “Writing shouldn’t be a contest between writer and reader”.

books don’t get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them.

Good advice about anything really. You can think all you want and imagine that everything is working and coming together, but you have to actually do the work to have any realization of something tangible. Until you can actually see it or touch it, it’s just something imaginary.

The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes.

The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do. So you write it. Then you put it aside. Not for months, but perhaps for a week or so. Even a few days. Do other things. Then set aside some uninterrupted time to read, and pull it out, and pretend you have never read it before — clear it out of your head, and sit and read it. (I’d suggest you do this on a print-out, so you can scribble on it as you go. ) When you get to the end you should have a much better idea of what it was about than you did when you started. (I knew The Graveyard Book would be about a boy who lived in a graveyard when I started it. I didn’t know that it would be about how we make our families, though: that’s a theme that made itself apparent while the book was being written.)

And then, on the second and subsequent drafts, you do four things:

1. You fix the things that didn’t work as best you can (if you don’t like the climactic Rock City scene in American Gods, trust me, the first draft was so much worse).
2. You reinforce the themes, whether they were there from the beginning or whether they grew like Topsy on the way. You take out the stuff that undercuts those themes.
3. You worry about the title.
4. At some point in the revision process you will probably need to remind yourself that you could keep polishing it infinitely, that perfection is not an attribute of humankind, and really, shouldn’t you get on with the next thing now?