To Delete or Not to Delete, that is the question...

NaNoWriMo is in full swing. Writers are huddled over their laptops, scrabbling to hit their daily goals, which makes this post timely.

Don't Do Eeeet!!

There comes a day in every writer's world when everything they've ever written looks like a steaming pile of camel dung. When the writer gazes upon this monstrosity, this absolute insult to the English language and slap in the face of all literary genius, they must do the logical thing. Delete. Crumple and toss. Shred. Burn the words, eliminate them from existence, retire the writing cap and start a nice vegetable garden.

Instead, I'd like to offer a viable and word saving alternative.

Walk. Away.

No, don't walk, run. Close the word doc, step away from the laptop or desktop or Moleskin notebook and do your laundry. Go for a walk. Go watch a movie. Read a book.

Anything but deleting all that you've written.

Stephen King started writing Carrie, hated the girl and hated the story, tossed it in the garbage and his wife salvaged it and said, "Moar."

Well, not in those words, but I'm sure it was something like that.

Anyway, he talks about that in On Writing and mentions that his first great book, the one that changed the course of horror writing forever, started out as something he tossed in the garbage.

I can't begin to tell you how many of my stories I started writing, stopped and hated, closed...and went back to later and wrote.

Hating your work is okay.

Yesterday was one of those days for me. They happen. I have gotten to the point that I recognize when I'm wriggling in loathing and I don't write. I market, I blog, I make a meatloaf, whatever...but once I've gotten into that swing, I don't write.

When I DO mass deletions (sometimes they happen. Sometimes you really DID write garbage or that scene CAN'T go in the book...this is a reality.), I stick it in a word doc called :

(Title Of Book)_Deleted

Just in case because, sometimes, I need those words later. If I don't, swell! I deleted correctly and those words are garbage. Or maybe those words are a 'secret scene' that ends up a blog post someday. Or maybe those words will only live on the harddrive of my laptop until some autobiographer drives his hover car to my house in the year 2187 to research me. Who knows? But I don't ever just DELETE them. I might need them later.

Since we're mid NaNoWriMo and everyone is bent on hitting word count goals, I figured it was a good time to mention this. Some days, you shouldn't write. Some days the best contribution you can give literature is the deletion of words and others it's the ability to NOT write or delete. And that's okay.

There is always tomorrow.

Happy Writing! (not deleting!)

I turn people on for a living...

Yesterday's post on gothic literature ties into today's on erotic.

Yes, I write smut. I turn people on for a living. Sounds easy. I hear that all the time, writing romance is easy.


The goal of the writer is to make the reader feel something. Whether it is the work of King, which drives the reader down the comfortable Main Street, Anywhere, USA, and then reveals that Anywhere is actually a horrifying place to live or the erotic novel with nipples puckered to hard points, the reader wants to be transported somewhere else.

An interesting facebook picture that someone sent (and I later had to forward) mentioned the book hangover--the feeling you get when you end a book and look around and everyone else is still going about their daily lives, unaware yours just shifted, a little, because of the emotional trauma on the page.

Not easy to do, not really, for the author.

While the goal of the gothic author is to make readers believe the impossible enough for goosebumps to raise on their arms, the goal of the romance author is to make the reader believe enough in the passion on the page that they fall in love with the characters. They fall so hard (sometimes so fast in the shorter stories) that they even can feel that rush, that high, that comes from falling. They come with the characters so deeply, they might even get turned on.

By words.

In a story.

If I wrote, "You are turned on, now," no reader would be wiping the steam from their monitors. But if I combine the words just right, I can leave a reader blushing--a physical response to a story I told.

How COOL is that?

Why do people read it? Well, humans are addicted to that feeling. Everyday life isn't full of chances to fall in love over and over so the story gives the reader the feeling without all of the complications. Someone once said to me that the genre causes woman to have unrealistic expectations, that they become addicted to the idea of romance in a book rather than the real life experience.



I laughed, not the most erudite of responses, but chocolate releases the same chemicals in the brain as sex and there aren't many ACTUAL chocolate addicts out there. We may crave it, but addiction? Yeah, not really. Nor do we try to replace the real life feeling of another person's hands on our skin with a candy bar.

Basically, what I am saying is that, yes, I turn people on for a living if I'm doing my job right. I make them fall in love with characters that only exist in my head until I let them loose in word form.

It isn't easy and it isn't something I can explain, exactly.

But if you're doing it right, those reading it will turn red.

And you know you're onto something.

Happy Writing!

Horribly Normal and Terribly Ordinary

Just as magical as the words on the page, a book has the ability to transport a reader across time, space and reality into someplace more. Whether the author chooses to use that ability to make their audience believe in love, death or fear depends on the gift of the storyteller many used their cursed pens to move us to a place where the scary thing isn’t in the closet. It’s in your husband’s eye. It hides in the sweet little old lady at the post office. It lurks in the hearts of men, truly the scariest place of all. Two of the greats in the land of heebie jeebies have got to be Stephen King and Shirley Jackson, both capturing the imaginations of generations with the strange, the twisted, and the horrifyingly mundane.

Shirley Jackson writhed in depression, social inequality and saw first-hand how awful people can treat each other. Not surprisingly, thus neutered in real life, she struck out at the conformity that leashed her in her writing. It’s said the line between genius and madness is a thin one and Jackson danced the line with stories like “The Lottery.” Although she was banished from Canada, attacked by her peers and driven to alienation, no one can contend that her stories didn’t make them feel something. She scared them because she removed the mask they hid behind, called a monster a monster, and painted the entire horrible picture in a setting so comfortable that readers wanted it to have a happy ending.

Like real life, Jackson didn’t give you the ending. You had to figure that out for yourself.

Most gothic horror, true gothic, leaves that dangling carrot, covered in maggots, for the reader to find. Neil Gaiman, author of gothic merit himself, interviewed Stephen King throughout his lifetime and became a fan of the genre as a child when he cracked open Salem’s Lot. “(King) has elements of horror, but they exist almost as a condiment for something that’s partly a tightly researched historical novel, partly a love-story, and always a musing on the nature of time and the past. (Gaiman 27) “

Like Shirley Jackson, King’s work has often been mislabeled as the book version of junk food. King himself labeled his work, “The literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.” But if the goal of the writer is to make the reader feel something, not just be entertained, King’s work is going to outlive him by as easily as Poe’s have survived the test of time. What makes it truly horrifying, and makes those trying to describe him start yanking out adverbs, is exactly what Gaiman noted. Both King and Jackson managed to tell a lovely story, riddled with all the tropes that we as human beings identify with. The summer is one we remember, having lived it. The characters are all familiar since we know people just like them. The tastes and smells are all comfortable as a pair of worn out socks but then the story twists, the familiar becomes strange and we are forced to look at ourselves and the possibility of evil in the mirror.

It’s that little bit of madness in the common that makes these stories impossible to put down. Who hasn’t sat in their home, blanket of night snuggled warm around us, smells all the same as any other night, and rolled over and looked at our lover, our child, our pet and wondered, just for a moment, what if? By playing off that what if, these authors make the tiny hairs on our arms raise, shivers kick in, and we let, for a second, that cloak of safety—that makes us think everything will have a happily ever after—slip and are forced to comprehend that bad things really do happen.

Worse, they could happen to you.

In Duma Key, Stephen King follows the mold that made him so utterly popular for so many years. He takes the normal, a contractor from Boston, and injures him in a work accident. Then he allows madness to seep into the gaping wound left behind. Slowly tearing the man from family, from reality, and placing him firmly into the world of the paranormal, the shift from what we expect to read to what actually happens is so subtle, the reader is left believing things that otherwise might seem impossible.

If not for the very mundane start to the story.

If someone told you they could paint pictures that changed reality, perhaps you would think them crazy. But when King presents it, relying on isolation, a secondary cast of believable characters and the very tastes and smells you’ve come to know, it becomes harder not to shiver in fear.

All storytellers must transport their readers to a place beyond words on paper. The gothic writer has to not only transport them off the page; they have to drive the reader out of their mind.

They make you fall in love only to lose the love to a demise worse than a mundane death.

They make you reminisce only to make you realize that the past is coming to get you.

But by triggering these primitive responses, by making us relive the days in caves where the darkness might actually have teeth and claws, maybe we remember what it is to feel really alive.

Works Cited

Gaiman, Neil. “The King and I.” Sunday Times Magazine 8 Apr 2012:27-32. Print.

Jackson, Shirley. “The Possibility of Evil.” 1965.

King, Stephen. Duma Key. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.

King, Stephen. “Stephen King Quotes.” Goodreads. Goodreads,Inc., 17 June 2010. Web. 02 July 2012.

Contractions

The only time in my life that I didn't get dinged for lack of contractions was while at least one person in the room was shouting, "PUSH!!"

Each and every stinkin round of edits ever to cross my desk has mention of my utter inability to tell a story and include contractions.

Sadly, I don't think in contractions. (I just used one...to prove I CAN use them. I don't like to but I CAN.)

The point? Every writer has a weakness.

Overuse of 'that word'

In my edits, crits, editing other peoples work and in chatting with author friends, I have found that we all tend to find one word that for some reason in our heads just sums up the story wonderfully. It might be juicy. Or smooth. Or slide. Or lubricious.

And for whatever reason, we say it twenty gazillion times.

I don't know why the writerly mind does this. But we do it. And NONE of us realizes we do this. There we are, happily clickity clacking away and overusing the shit out of lubricious and don't realize we have said it twenty times on THIS PAGE ALONE.

Why? Why do we do it?

I don't know. All I can say is thank the gods above for editors, crit partners and the occasional friend who is kind enough to ask both, "Uh, what the hell does lubricious mean?" and "Why the hell do you keep saying it?"

We also may overuse a technique...be it a sentence structure, a dialogue tag or something else. If you get dinged either in crits or in edits for this...author friends, do not shed a tear because I can tell you from my VAST (okay, not vast but pretty damned extensive) research that we all do it.

The same mistake...every effin time

Like my contraction issue. Yeah, some of us are smart enough to correct their mistakes over time.

Some of us just keep doing the same damn thing over and over again. The best I can tell you there is PRAY that your crit readers know your weakness and SEE your weakness and CATCH it before it gets contracted. Otherwise...your editor will and...well, yeah. Then you are me and you just get to beat your head off your desk wondering what the hell is so hard about writing a damn CONTRACTION now and again???

Or whatever your personal weakness is...

Not that contractions would be something that ANYone with a sane and rational mind would NOT use...

Freakin frakking stupid contractions...

I guess my point in this rant is that... we all make mistakes. And when we get our edits back we all beat our heads against our desks... or the handy brick wall...and wonder how in the hell we could have done something so amazingly STUPID.

But, uh, neat point, folks?

If you are doing edits...

You are doing something lots of people NEVER do. Lots of people talk about writing a book. Lots of other people actually go so far as to sit down and write PART of a book.

A few actually get determined enough to finish one.

Out of those few, a few will get the balls to submit it.

And out of those few, only a handful ever get a contract.

So if you are editing and feeling sort of lamers because you made a really stupid mistake...

Uh, you are pretty fucking cool to even have gotten to that point. Go get you some chocolate. Do a little dance. Then get your damn edits done. Cuz you rock, cupcake.

Happy writing. Or in this case, editing.

The smell of DaFeet

I love baby feet. They are so tiny and super soft.

My youngest son currently has feet you can literally smell from across the room.

I did say that I loved baby feet.

I brought up the subject of feet because I got a rejection yesterday.

I had such mixed feelings about this particular rejection, it triggered a blog. And spaghetti sauce. Lemme start at the beginning.

I have four contracts right now. Four. Not shabby for an author who, on December first, found out her publisher was closing it's doors and that in this case, loyalty equaled putting all my eggs in one basket... and my basket had just broken.

I am also an editor and a reviewer. And a full time college student. And a single mom of three kiddos, two of which go to a charter school at home.

To say that things have been hectic this January would be a bit like walking outside during a blizzard and saying, "Hmm... Look, there is a snowflake."

So seeing the letter regarding a synopsis that I had sent out on a book that I am nearly done writing (Read: Have not finished writing not to mention polished as much as I personally prefer before my work sees daylight so gaaah!!), I said out loud, "Shit!"

If they had accepted it, then I had to finish it up fast and shove it out the door, polish be damned.

And then I read the email. They had (very nicely, I might add, in a really thoughtful manner) rejected it. And I said, "Thank God."

And then the usual mess of authoremotions kicked in. "Why did they reject me? Maybe I am not good enough. Gah, I suck. They knew it. I know it. Hells, it is for the best. At least my massive suckitude won't be released on the public for them to tear me to shreds as I so deserve..."

Yeah. I mentioned it was sort of a mixed bag of emotions? It was. Really.

So I plodded out to the kitchen, still in my jammies, and made spaghetti sauce.

I am Italian and my grandfather, Guisseppe Sabatina, came over from Italy (or so my mother has told me) and married his little Dutch girl. My mother put red sauce on everything. There was something soothing about the familiarity of the gestures-- frying the meat, adding the spices... tasting the sauce.

And I called my best friend. She pointed out that our motto is that everything happens for a reason. My plate right now is filled to overflowing and I have other projects I have to work on. Deadlines I have to meet. More time to work on this one was a blessing, not a bad thing.

Between the smell of the sauce and the sound of her voice and it was like the miasma of mixed up feelings lifted.

The smell of dafeet wasn't too much to bear. It wasn't a defeat, not really. To quote Damon, from Vampire Diaries, "It is right. It's just not right now."

Why am I telling you guys all this?

I know you all get rejected, too. And I know it sucks. This wasn't my first rejection--far, far, far from it. And it is easy to say don't take them personally. Don't take bad reviews personally. Just keep going.

But if you are having a bad day or whatever... and it happens... it isn't easy to shake off.

Not for anyone.

Find the thing that helps you find your center.

Make the spaghetti sauce. Or play basketball. Or a video game. Or have sex. Whatever trips your trigger.

And then look at it again.

Because then you can keep going.

Okay, Happy writing!

Sick kids vs. productivity

This week, I had the joy of sick kiddos. Projectile vomit, for those of you who have no kids, is actually projectile. And it hasn't ceased to amaze me, after nearly fifteen years of being a mother, to see a child shoot anything the length of their body. The muscle control... Yeah, no wonder their stomach hurts afterwards.

I guess I didn't go to enough parties in college. Probably I would have learned how amazing the human body was earlier had I just gone to more keggers.

That said, I still managed to get an epic amount of work done. Which brings me to my point...

If you train yourself to expect certain things daily, you will expect them in times of adversity as well.

What the hell do I mean? No worries. I fully intend to explain.

A runner gets up and trains their body to expect to run. If they skip that run, they will feel as crappy as I would if I tried to run five miles. Their body wants that run, that adrenaline rush. Without it, it complains.

The same thing goes for your writing and productivity in whatever goal you set for yourself. If you set the bar about yeaaah high. Every day you hit the bar...

You will find that on days when you feel like crap or when life gets in the way, you are driven to at least hit that bar.

The secret to being a writer, the real secret, really is writing. Every day. Something.

Even if it is just a blog. Even if it is just editing what you wrote yesterday. Even if you are just writing something inane. It trains you to do it and do it daily.

No one that I know of can write an 80/90k book in a day. (And believe me, I know some people with some crazy prolific daily word counts.) But most anyone can write 1k. A lot of people can write 5-7k.

If you do that everyday, how many days before you hit the 90k?

Your first book might just suck.

Really, just like your first marathon run might be challenging just to complete. There is a chance no one will buy it. And even if it doesn't suck and someone buys it, maybe it needs lots of technical stuff overhauled.

But if you fix that stuff and keep writing, you will continue to suck less and less. Until writing is something that comes as naturally as breathing.

Most of my blogs are about 1k long. If you sit and ponder that a little, it sounds long. Daily writing 1k about whatever is going on or writing advice...

But that is what I do. I write.

And you can, too. But it has to be something you are willing to work for.

Okay, happy writing, all.

Writing is Easy (a job?)

Someone (who shall remain nameless) recently said to me that it must be nice not to have to work and just go to school.

Well, I have to agree. That would be nice.

Unfortunately, I don 't know a thing about it.

For today, I am going to focus on just one of my jobs (since, although this person didn't realize it, I have more than one) to simplify the focus of the blog.
I am an author.

If you don't think this is a job, then you have never done it. Or perhaps you haven't done it the way I do it. The following post is full of my opinions on the craft and my advice. I can't cite its credibility. I can tell you I have won some awards, gotten some awesome reviews and hit a bestsellers list using these tools but I don't know everything. (That is the cool thing about being a writer... You get to learn something new everyday. Best job on the planet. Just yesterday, I learned about death erections. W00T!) If that isn't enough credibility, there is a red x somewhere floating to the far right corner of your screen. Click it. (sorry. first cuppa coffee. muahhahahaa...)

What is an authors job?

The simple answer is to tell a story. But if it really was that simple, everyone would do it. To tell a story well, your story has to flow, have believable characters, have understandable terms, move the characters forward in some way and leave readers feeling like they have gone on a journey with you.

Sounds pretty easy, right?

Flow

If your editor tells you that something doesn't flow well, this is a huge problem.

Example:

The acrid burn of the smoke and the crackle of flames was a living thing, churning like a red sea around Marcy. Crawling on her hands and knees, she choked and thought of the ocean. The ocean had pretty waves that broke on sand. Sand was gritty. Gritty like the air around Marcy. If she could just get out of this hellhole, she could find her son.

Okay, I think I made it pretty obvious in that passage where the flow breaks up and throws the reader off track. If not, let me remove part of it and tell me if you can see how it flows better with some of it taken out.

Example:

The acrid burn of the smoke and the crackle of flames was a living thing, churning like a red sea around Marcy. Crawling on her hands and knees, she choked. If she could just get out of this hellhole, she could find her son.

Flow can be even more dramatic than that example but the point is that it throws the reader out of the story you are telling. Anything that jars the reader, taking away from the story you are telling, is considered a disruption of flow. It can even be an awkward word choice. Like this example:

Darcy's hands fluttered like lead balloons. Lead does not flutter. Neither do balloons-they float. Your reader's head is tilted sideways and they are thinking, "Huh?" And you lost them.

Believable Characters

Believable characters are one of the hardest things for an author to accomplish. The art of breathing life into words and turning them into people that you could actually fall in love with, hate, laugh at, be friends with... that is nothing less than magic.

But you have to do it on two levels as an author. It is your job to not only breathe life into your human (or alien or animal or... whatever) characters but also your setting. Worldbuilding is just as important as telling us that your main character has brown eyes and likes ice cream.

It is a balancing act. You can't dump all of the info on us. (I will do another post another day on the disservice of an infodump.) But you have to know it so intimately that we can see it with you. Which brings about the key to giving us those believable characters...

Show, Don't Tell

You can't tell me that she has brown eyes or that she is hurting. Show me those brown eyes leaking tears of agony and have her scream her pain to the stars. Tricky. But if you distance me, the reader from your characters by telling me what they are doing rather than showing me...

I am bored. I have just been jarred out of the story. You lost your flow. You didn't do your job, author. And I, the reader, am suffering because of it.

And while you are doing this, you have to do it in understandable terms...

What the hell are understandable terms? Good question. Understandable terms are things that your reader are familiar with. I know, making a reader learn something new is great. I try to write in something that will teach at least one tidbit in each and every story I tell--even my shorts. I love to learn and I love to teach. Tossing a moral in or a chance to get on my soapbox... I love that shit. Especially if I can sneak it in.

But that is why we have context clues. Your job as an author includes giving fragments of information when introducing new terms so that the reader can keep on seamlessly reading without cranking out the dictionary or googling every other word.

Now, this does NOT hold true for academic writing or non-fiction. But for fiction writing, the goal is to take the reader away on a journey and you can't do that if you lose them. You want to take them with you and you have the tools (words) to do that. Make sure you give them the breadcrumbs they need to stay with you.

Move the characters forward

Allowing room for growth is important. If your character starts the book off afraid to get into a relationship because her last one was with an abusive SOB... she has tons of room for growth. If your male lead is emotionally retarded because he doesn't believe in love and is stupid enough to tell her that, GREAT! But remember, they have to move forward from that point. And you can't have them do something so unredeemable that your readers pitch the book across the room, done with the characters and done with you as an author.

A balancing act

All in all, it is a balancing act. You are juggling characters. You are juggling social networks. You are juggling publishers and editors and other author friends. You have a real life, too.

And sometimes people in your real life will comment that you need to get a real job... *giggle*
Because... y'know... writing isn't any work.

Happy writing! And juggling.

From the mixed up files of Virg: How I edit my own work

I got an interesting email on one of my loops about editing and it got me to thinking about one of the steps of the writing process that I haven't shared with my up-and-coming author friends.

So yes, this is another one of my very popular How To Be A Writer Posts.

(You are giggling but if you saw the number of views that these posts get, you would agree that they are very popular indeed. *wiggles fingers at writers*)

Editing Your Own Work

After you write something, we all know that you should go back no less than a thousand times and edit it to death. Then you should let it sit for a week or a month or some other lengthy amount of time and then edit it again.

And then your work is perfect.

No, it isn't.

You then need another set of eyes (or ten) to look at it. Me, personally? I send it out to my beta group. I am a lucky gal. My beta group consists of a group of dedicated readers. I have posted what a reader is before on another blog. A reader is someone who is able to see a story for the storyline and tear it to bits. Why did your character talk through a door? Why did they hop in the shower and start blow drying their hair? (Yes, I once electrocuted a character by having them blow dry their hair in the shower. It actually made it through three rounds of edits and got caught in copyedits... but I digress.)

Then I send it out to three professionals. In my case, professionals means people who are either a. also authors so they are just as anal as I am or b. also editors so just as anal as I am. They aren't going to tiptoe around my feelings and treat me like a mamby pamby sissy girl. They are going to make my manuscript bleed. And I like it when it bleeds.

But they are honest and that is why I like the blood. It is good, healing blood. It will get any poison that is making my manuscript sick out and let it be what it could be.

I do the changes, fix it and then...

I send it to three other people.

So, yes, I send it to an ARMY of people. *hellooooo beta world!!*

And then I write a query letter. And I send THAT to an army of people. And they shred my query.

(Are you getting that this whole writing thing isn't the solitary process you were thinking it to be? Yeah, the network you are building? It is an incredibly useful thing. And not just for bitching at 3am about lack of Starbucks delivery service. Although, they are good for that as well.)

And then I submit it to a publisher.

With the full knowledge that if they chose to accept my manuscript that they will then put my work through at least three rounds of edits and one of copyedits. And that the editor might have completely different views and opinions from mine and from the people who beta'd for me.

I once rewrote a book three times while in edits. The editor had me change the point of perspective THREE times throughout the editing process.

And here is the key...

I did not tell off the editor.

Your editor is your friend. Their goal is to help you make your book better using all the tools in their vast arsenal. Not worse. No editor has ever (that I know of) sabotaged a book. Why in the hell would they do that?

Have I always agreed with everything my editors have had to say. Nuh-uh. But they didn't know that.

It has become ritual for me to open edits and a bottle of wine with my best friend and any edits that frustrate me are duly yelled at and told off the first day I get them. With as colorful of language as we can come up with. (Points for creativity are awarded on a scale... meh, we won't go into it.) And then I put the wine bottle away... (Okay, it goes in the trash because it is empty. Don't judge.) and I get serious and do the work. The editors never hear any of those colorful comments. Because that isn't professional. But it is fun to rant and rail-- In the privacy of my home over wine and with my friend.

One of my currently dear friends edited one of my books and I can tell you right now she probably was frustrated as hell with me. She probably was telling me off from her editors chair... which makes me giggle. *wiggles fingers at friend in question* I have a really bad habit of starting out books in first person perspective, changing to third and staying in third. My voice is in third, for the most part. But when I am finding my characters, getting to know my world... I start out in first. And then I catch my stride and fall into third. I ALWAYS do this. I don't fucking know why. But I do. You can literally tell when I get immersed in my story because everything literally smooths out, makes sense and flows... and the red edit marks magically stop. But those first few chapters are always a struggle for me.

Not every editor has known how to deal with that.

But each one I have worked with has taught me something. I have learned bits about blocking from one that I didn't know before. Another gave me priceless information about showing and not telling. Another editor really brought home the value of action modifiers vs tags.

I hit ARe's bestsellers list. I have won awards.

I wouldn't in a million years THINK of self pubbing a piece of my own work that was not EDITED EXTENSIVELY.

The value of editing is something I cannot promote enough. You are too close to your work. You have read and reread the same passage so many damn times that you can probably recite that shit in your SLEEP.

An editor is a fresh set of eyes that can see what you wrote vs. what you think you wrote. An editor can see what your reader will see.

Okay, moral: Edit. Be open to edits. Your work is not as perfect as you think it is.
Drinking wine and playing games that involve coming up with colorful insults is good.

Happy writing!!

Include Me!

So you are sitting at your computer and racking your brain for something to write about...

Here is a short list of story starters:
1. A werewolf walked into a bar...
Trite? Nay! You can go anywhere with this! Examples:

a. Everyone else had better costumes. Feeling stupid and insecure, Jessica tugged at her sleeves awkwardly. She wasn't sure how anyone had talked her into this. Werewolves were soooo last year.

b. He was hungry. His suit disguised his nature but he was on the prowl...

c. The studio cameras rolled and the only real werewolf, the director, grinned at the irony.

See? You can go many directions with even an overused idea.

2. The sound of the slap rang out across the room, loud in the sudden silence.

No, you don't have to start with back story. Actually, DON'T start with back story. Ever.

If you can in anyway jump the reader into the action and spread the explanation out later, do it. Hook first, storytelling later. Don't info dump. Don't prologue the info dump. Don't.

Okay, this stuff can be fine if you are working on your first draft. Also fine for NaNoWriMo purposes... But remember, you can be bold.

You can hook em and tell em a story.

After are...
You are the storyteller.

3. Blood dripped onto the pavement. How did she end up at this point?

One of the few times I have found a prologue amusing was when the main character was dying right at the beginning of the book. Good stuff. Love it. Not every author pulls it off. I gotta say, me personally after reading a few chapters of Bella's saga in Twilight... I wanted her to die. I loved Breaking Dawn. The other three books... I kinda wanted Edward to eat her. That said, other authors did it well. If you think you can, do it.

Okay, I said it was a short list. How is your NaNoWriMo going? Are you behind yet?
;)
I am. Everyone in my house got sick this week. So we are running behind on everything. But... I have developed an overwhelming love for the nasty taste of cough meds... The pic above is me playing with my camera while my youngest and I waited at Doc Pirate's office yesterday. :)

Count on me...

There is something scary about looking at a blank Word document or a blank piece of paper and realizing that somehow, some way, you are expected to fill it with words.

NaNoWriMo is the once-a-year gathering of people who have such a great love of words that they grasp the insane idea that they can write an entire book (50k for 'adult') in a month.

How scary is that?

What will you write about? Can you do it? A whole book in a month???

Having written a few books in a month and some even faster, I can say, honestly, it can be done.

Of course, that whole eating thing... Seeing people... Not snapping when food is shoved at you... All of that kind of goes to the wayside. The story literally eats your world. Social life? Pssht. Forgeddaboutit.

So why would someone do that to themselves on purpose?

The knowledge that the story will live longer than you could.

This does not make the creation of it any less scary. The good thing about NaNoWriMo is that it takes the big, scary book and chops it down into small, bite-sized pieces. 50,000 words?

Terrifying.

5thousand a day?

Well, that is little more than an essay.

Which makes the whole book almost a collection of essays on the same topic...

I like outlines. No, my outlines are not neatly numbered things involving Roman numerals and precision.

Mine look something like this:
(Actual outline from one of the Odd books)

"Chapter Six
Jumped outside the raft/hungry eyes scene/fiancé helps out by nearly getting eaten
Chapter Seven
Loses Fiancé, meets up with Chance and goes after a lead on the hammer and catches up with the terrible trio at Brennen’s Pub
Chapter Eight
Bar Fight over pool game? Chance is root of it. Mention wings"

That became Siren's Song. It doesn't look anything like the finished product. The goal of your outline is not to be pretty or follow any rules... The goal of your outline is you getting out the shape of your story. It is little more than when someone working with clay squashes out the shape that will later become the masterpiece.

It doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you. But if you can see where you are going, it is easier to get there. Think of it like GPS for your writing. It is a general road map of where the climax is going to be... How they get there... What the resolution will be.

You can stray from this outline. It is for YOU.

Then you have those nice bite-sized chunks I mentioned earlier. You can write chapter seven easily. You know what happens. You are just ballooning it out. Filling in your characters responses into a planned event. Adding textures and flavors and doing the storytelling.

Remember, even if you fall behind on your NaNoWriMo goals, they are goals. The purpose behind it is to give you the experience of sitting down every day- with a goal- in front of that scary keyboard.

You can do it.

Good luck, NaNoWriMo-ers.

And friend me! I am virg_nelson over there. If you need any more inspiration/advice, hit me up.

And, I can't stress this enough, HAVE FUN WITH IT!! :)