Helllllllooooooo Otterites!

Martin nearly had to shackle me to the blog to get me to write a post. For that I apologize. It’s been some time since I had anything to post. Nothing much has struck my fancy. Like Martin, I read a lot. Usually it’s in the small moments of downtime. Sometimes I just veg out on mindless fiction, which is what I primarily do if I’m to be honest. I’ve got a ton of non-fiction to get to and finish, especially that Frederick Douglass bio i mentioned when we did the Our Heroes episode featuring Douglass.

Since I last posted, I have spent quite a bit of time with Francis’s manuscript for his forthcoming best-seller. It will be his first published work, and it’s good. Really good. Martin and I have given our advice on the book, a lot of which Francis has agreed with and incorporated many of the suggestions we’ve made. Which I trust has earned us at least an autographed first edition, if not bit parts in the blockbuster movie to be made from the book.

Currently it’s NaNoWriMo time. National Novel Writing Month. It’s a challenge to write a book in a month. Not a complete book, ready for publication, but at least a first draft. The idea is to write 50,000 words in a month. Broken down, that’s only 1,667 words a day. I wrote most of the first half of my own book doing the challenge and let other things get in the way of finishing it.

My goal is to finish the first full draft this November. It won’t be a 50,000 word novel. I think that’s an incredibly low target for a published novel. I expect my book to come in around 125,000 words, give or take. I started with about 53,000 in the bank so to speak, and I’ve written every day of November. I’ve actually added about 25,000 words already. Not counting the total for today, the 10th. At this rate, I should have no difficulty getting the first draft finished. I’m averaging about 2600 words a day.

While prepping for NaNoWriMo, I spent some time mapping out the rest of the book, refreshing my memory on where things were and so on. I rearranged some scenes and inserted placeholders for others in the part I’ve already written. While I am not a plotter as Francis is (he mentioned writing a 30,000 word SYNOPSIS once before he began!), I am not 100% a pantser either. I don’t necessarily like to know everything I’m going to write, because I want the characters to take on a life of their own. I want to leave a little room for surprise in the process. Give me a beginning, some steps along the way and the ending. The rest fills in along the way. OK. Probably a little more than some steps along the way.

Along with that part of my prep, I’ve been reading up on story structure and thinking about whether or not I’ve done a decent attempt at applying good principles so far. Mostly, yes. Though I am going to go back and re-work a number of things. One of those is what happens to my protagonist. Since I started the book without having a clear end in mind, I didn’t have a clear arc for my protagonist. One of the things I realized is that he doesn’t change much in the original grand arc I had in my mind.

That makes for bad story. Very bad.

If you pay attention to real life, you come to understand a key idea: If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Martin puts it this way: Either get busy living or get busy dying. Either expression says the same thing as this: Life is not static. Never. We literally are always changing. Growing up. Growing older. Gaining hair and weight. Losing hair and getting new ailments as we age. Most especially, we need to be learning and changing for the better. Not learning and changing for the worst, is perhaps the most awful type of change there is.

But there is always change. Always. Even if it’s just one more step closer to that inevitable grave. Some people’s change is made up of digging their own grave and lying down in it to await death. Metaphorically speaking. We all recognize the futility and ignominy of such a life and maybe even know someone living one. Some see it as a great life. Safe. Guaranteed. No risk. No harm.

No. I say no to such a thing. It is evil in concept and diabolical in action.

A life worth living, worth living for and dying for, has to incorporate change. Preferably for the better. Meaning we have to change. Learn. Be better.

If you’re a writer, you understand this about your characters. Well, if you’re a good writer you will. A character that goes through an entire book and comes out the exact same way as he entered the book is a failure. A failure as a person (even fictional people can be failures). A failure of the story and a failure on the part of the writer.

A life lived without little to no change, is the same. A failure as a person, a failure of your life and a failure of your potential. Instead, take the bull by the horns and be the writer of your own life. Do not let anyone else write your life. Do not leave it largely unwritten.

Make your life worthy of being read. Not because you’re a super-hero, a special ops killer, a survivor in a zombie wasteland or a doer of big things.

Make it worthy because you grew, learned and left the world a better place than you found it.