PinoyWrimos

To any NaNo enthusiast, October is the month when you get to plan out your plot, do your research, and rub your hands together in front of your keyboard, counting the days until the first second of November 1st strikes. It’s a full 31-day preparation period, where you get to break your ties with the rest of humanity so that you can lock yourself up in your room and get your novel written. To me, October 2008 was anything but.

I had the flu in the first two weeks of October. As I emerged from bed rest and got ready to write out a plot, I accidentally scratched my cornea with my fingernail and ended up with a temporarily blinded right eye. And just as my eye was healing, just as I was ready to scramble for a last minute outline – as well as a real plot, because I had no story to show for all my weeks of forced confinement – I received word that my grandmother back home in the Philippines was dying.

Now here’s the thing: I’m working on my PhD at Purdue University. I live in West Lafayette, Indiana, which is twelve/thirteen time zones away from the Philippines. I am far away from everything that I love. I have papers to finish, statistics homework to do, and a dissertation to prepare for.

The grandmother who had always been my biggest fan was slipping away fast. When November 1 came, I was with my friends, escaping from the world in a Firefly-themed party. My grandmother died on November 5. My cornea is still healing. My flu is coming back from time to time. I finally started writing my NaNo novel on November 6.

This year, my novel is called “Weird and Lovely,” and it’s about a girl who loses her grandmother to cancer – but who regains her strength and finds herself after spending time with the ghosts of her dead grandparents. One week after I had first started writing “Weird and Lovely,” on November 13th, I passed the 50,000-word mark.

A lot of people ask me how I can type out a lot of words, and how I can come up with a story. I usually joke that I don’t stop drinking coffee. But the truth is: it has nothing to do with caffeine. It has nothing to do with anything that I eat or drink. It doesn’t even have anything to do with advanced planning or outlining the plot ahead of time. It’s just that, for the longest time, I’ve never really had a hard time coming up with words. I’m just naturally talkative. The trick is to get me to shut up, or worse, be concise.

The words, however, come pouring out when a story means something to me. This year, my novel is my way of healing my own wounds, of looking at my own past and seeing how it made me what I am today. I also got a few pointers from my professors this semester, who were privy to my affairs. One professor told me to celebrate my grandmother’s life by writing, because I truly was bent on giving NaNo up this year. Another professor told me to tell the story of my family before no one would be alive and around to tell it.

So, really, this novel is my therapy and my contribution to my history. It has stories from my childhood, tales that I heard from my aunts and uncles about my grandparents, and my own wish to see my grandmother once again.

I may have taken the roundabout way to tell you how to survive NaNo mid-month, but I needed my own story to tell you this: no one can tell your story but you. This means that no one is there to correct you, no one is there to tell you that you’re wrong, and no one is going to jump on you and tear your hair out if you make mistakes. You need only to set that story free, that story locked behind the bars of that prison in your head. Only you hold the key.

If you love your story, and if you have a story to tell, the words will flow easily. But some days, you may find yourself lagging behind, lacking inspiration, and thinking, “Why did I even attempt this?”

For you, I offer this advice: take a break.

It might sound counterintuitive, but really, if you want to get the words out, you can’t squeeze them out of your brain. You need to let the words flow naturally, by their own force. Do something else, something brainless: play the piano idly, take a walk and look at the world around you, go to the mall and watch people, hang out with your friends, mend the hems of your torn jeans, draw, design ballroom dancing shoes for Yao Ming, watch TV, watch a movie, and, if all else fails, sleep!

It’s not you that’s getting burned out: It’s your head. Recharge, get yourself some energy, and then return to the fray. You’ll find ideas pouring out of you; in fact, the most menial tasks are great ways for your brain to suddenly wake up. You may get that eureka moment as you’re sipping your coffee, listening to a sad song on the radio, or looking at yourself in the mirror and asking what the heck you’re doing on this planet.

Here’s another piece of advice: learn to read the language of your own body. When you feel that the words are coming out quickly, that your fingers are starting to take on a life of their own, and that your story is moving as though it had its own breath and soul, then you know that you’re on the right track. But when you feel that you are forced to write the novel, when you feel that you are being pushed to do something that you aren’t in the mood to do, and when this feels like an obligation, then stop. Rest. Do something else. Don’t turn NaNoWriMo into torture. Remember, the best writing should set you free, not imprison you.

You’ve reached the halfway mark – and you still have fifteen days to go before November 2008 closes. You will be tired out, thinking that you can go no further, and finding ways to push yourself so that you can at least get another thousand words to meet your quota, or another hundred, or even just one word. Rest when you can. Read your body language. Now is not the time to quit.

This is your moment to shine: this is your moment to tell your story. Whether you started on November 1st or November 6th; whether you had nothing at all happening to you in October, or cried yourself dry; whether you planned your novel or not, you have a story. You alone are the storyteller. Weave your tale. Write it down. You have that power.

Inez is a writer, editor, journalist, designer, scientist, educator, and dreamer. She was the ML for the region in 2005, and this is her fifth NaNo win (sixth, if you count her two novels last year). Her first two NaNoWriMo novels, THE SANCTUARY and THE ROMANTIC, are available via Lulu.com. You can visit her website at http://illustria.thefreebizhost.com/ .

by Dean Alfar

Hello, fellow NaNoWriMo-er!

The time is now and there is no turning back. Your novel will be complete by month’s end. I’m sure you have the story in your head and it’s only a matter of getting the words down on paper (or your screen). Discipline will be key to your success, but there are also other aspects of writing that will improve your novel, beginning with Character.

Like my wife says, we are all contradictions in terms. This is something to keep in mind when developing characters for a story.

As people, we are capable of the noblest of intentions and the most unspeakable of thoughts. We love and hate, admire and envy, build and tear down, laugh at adversity and weep at the thought of injustice. Sometimes, we appreciate the beauty of simple things; sometimes we can’t be bothered to wake up to watch the sun rise. We are busy and self-centered, humble and giving of our time, selfish and ignorant, free and wise. Within each person is the ability to choose his attitude for any given circumstance, or instead be swept away, unable to cope with the situation.

Every person you see is a walking trove of stories, a living contradiction. Certainly not all of them have experiences akin to a Templar revelation, but there are many smaller stories within their frames, conversations with lovers and enemies, dreams of wealth and betterment, secret passions and activities unseen, techniques for bargaining with vendors and ways to deal with corrupt policemen, multiple travelogues of places visited, foreign words and phrases that mean more than their connotations, vespertine romances and remarkable dalliances, jeremiads of lost loved ones and the usual megillah about ungrateful friends – most seemingly prosaic, but beneath the superficies are narratives of the human condition. There are stories in everyone: your parents, your employer, the man next door, the librarian, the person across from you in the bus, the receptionist who greets you everyday, everyone. And, of course, you.

Fiction mines the lives of people, their flaws and fears, their loves and hopes, their small moments of joy and sorrow. Writers expose dualities, the inherent blemishes that make people interesting. Texts abound with both hero and anti-hero, and the protagonist is not necessarily a perfect person (if she was, she’d be boring to read). What happens in terms of plot is secondary if you focus on character and write character-driven narratives. These are the characters that are memorable to reader because they struggle to understand what’s going on, striving to live within the boundaries of the pages to the best of their abilities. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t, but it is how they react to the struggle that exposes their natures, that makes them living beings that the reader can root for or at least identify with.

So, where do ideas for characters come from? Honestly, ideas for characters are as common as dirt. A writing workshop or an evening out with friends can generate more than you can immediately use. The best resource? The people around you. So are good characters, like good ideas, rare? I believe in the old adage that says there is nothing new under the sun. Stories, like the ideas within them and the characters that inhabit them, are as old as the first dreams of man. We reinvent them and express them in new ways that are relevant to us as storytellers in this day and age, as well as to our purpose in telling the story.

How can textured characters be developed in a matter of pages or paragraphs? By exploring their duality: giving them flaws to deal with as they seek to achieve their goals. An easy temptation is to caricature or stereotype, placing characterization low on the totem pole of priorities and giving the privileged position to the idea. A quick common method by lazy writer is to resort to the Archetype and leave it at that. This results in flat, uninteresting characters that speak the same way and react predictably, stultifying the reader with personalities that are the equivalent of a brown paper bag. This is laziness, pure and simple.

Consider duality as you write your characters: think of your characters as real people and think of the people you know as characters, then bring the interesting things you learn to the page.

Your goal is to explore the novelistic space and it’s more fun (and engaging) when you have characters that are memorable and believable.

Get writing!

Dean Francis Alfar wrote “Salamanca” for NaNoWriMo in 2004. It went on to win the Grand Prize for Novel at the 2005 Palanca Awards and was published by the Ateneo Press. His fiction has been published both here and abroad. His collection of speculative fiction, “The Kite of Stars and Other Stories”, was published by Anvil Fantasy in 2007. With his wife, Nikki Alfar, he edits the annual anthology “Philippine Speculative Fiction”, now in its 4th volume.

by Julie L.F. Cruz (planet_telex)

Joining NaNoWriMo for the first time last year made for one of the most memorable (and busiest!) months in my gap year, 2007. I’d graduated high school a year early, and was lucky enough to have parents who actually allowed me to take a gap year to recover from the burnout of studying in Philippine Science High School. I spent early 2007 being the awesomest bum ever — never getting bored despite the free time, baking, shopping, getting my nails done, and most notably, writing: I’d penned six episodes of my own television drama series, Mixology (best pitched as RENT meets Cheers meets Grey’s Anatomy) over the span of two weeks.

I found out about the National Novel Writing Month from a fellow fan fiction writer online, and I figured, piece of cake! I had no school, no previous commitments, just free time 24/7.

And then November began.

All these events started popping up one by one on my schedule: meet-ups with friends, my alma mater’s school fair, nightly YM conferences, write-ins that weren’t really write-ins (I’m mostly to blame for that one). I’d gotten this horrible job as an IT writer/researcher for an online creative content company which I absolutely detested (fellow NaNo-er Mark liked to refer to my relationship with this job as “battered girlfriend syndrome,” and I reckon he was probably right) which I quit, came back to, and then quit again. Not to mention full marathons of Brothers & Sisters and Popular. Days would go by where I wouldn’t write anything for my novel at all because I was too busy doing something else, or I wasn’t in the mood, or I was just plain lazy. The days added up, and on November 29th, I was only halfway there, with 25,000 words to go.

I finished it in that last day, thankfully, but that’s not the important part. Over the course of four weeks, in addition to my very own novel, I’d gained new friends whom I still get together with for movies and theater shows (Altar Girlz, go!), and I made myself a more active participant of NaNoWriMo than I expected I would be. I was the unofficial Events Coordinator, planning gimiks under the guise of productive write-ins where nobody really wrote, just chatted about their personal lives, opinions and crushes, then complained about writer’s block. I even volunteered to compile and print out the Philippine NaNoWriMo 2007 Anthology, a nice memento of the craziness of the past year. (Contact me to claim your copy! P250 lang!)

Even though I’m more than twice as busy now, with a nice, cushy gig at HSBC, I’d still do it all over again, even at the risk of driving myself insane. And I hope that you’ll all take that chance, too. Life’s full of so many inspirations for my next novel, tentatively titled You Look Pretty in a Headset, and of course I can’t wait to meet up with everybody again, old and new, and be the Official PinoyWriMo Distraction once more, haha! I’ve got an expanded arsenal of pictures of hot guys that I want to show you! Look, it’s Rodrigo Santoro…

by Sarah Cada (fuyu)

How do you make such intriguing, solid, and consistent characters in your stories? It’s so easy to feel for them! How do you do it?

Even though I’m not exactly an expert writer, I’ve been asked that so much recently that I finally decided to blog about it.

I’ve heard many writers ending up getting stuck in the middle of writing a story not because they run out of ideas, but because they don’t like their characters anymore. Sometimes it seems like their characters aren’t behaving the way they should, and are therefore ruining the storyline. This is a pretty common problem, I think, and a problem that could have been avoided if the characters had been planned well.

So how do I make my characters consistent?

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