Okay, young writers in tri-county area around From My Shelf!
Were you participating in our kids' writers' group? Or maybe you wished you could, but just couldn't seem to get to the meetings.....
Did you get a chance to talk with YA author Anita Howard (A.G. Howard) a little over a month ago? Do you remember her advice to you, not just as young people who want to be authors, but to ALL writers??? Anita said, "write it through, to the finish." It doesn't matter, she said, if half of what you write is pretty rough. It doesn't matter if that first draft has is kind of crappy. It doesn't matter if parts of it don't make sense, or if the white car from chapter 2 shows up again in chapter 8 as a red car because you forgot what color it was the first time you mentioned it. Write it through, all the way to the end. Anita told us that the JOY, the exhilaration, the pure amazing sense of accomplishment you get from FINISHING a story all the way to the end will push you to new places as a writer.
In this, Anita is echoing what a lot of other writers, publishers, and writing teachers will tell you. No, she's not copying them or plagiarizing them. She's speaking from her experience, and it was great for her to share it. What's cool is that this is the experience of many thousands of authors. That's why so many will tell you the same thing: write that book all the way to the end. Get out a "sloppy copy", so you have a finished story to edit. That's one reason that "NaNoWriMo" was created.
"NaNoWriMo" is "
National
Novel
Writing
Month". During the month of November, thousands of people pledge to write the entirety of a book. They decide how many words they'd like to end up with, and divide it by 30 days.
As a *very* general guideline -- not a hard-and-fast rule by ANY means -- a middle readers' book might have about 30,000 words. So would an adult "novella". Or a Stephen King "short story" :) Young adult novelists should aim for 50,000 to 60,000 words. That being said, the middle grades to "young adult" genres are probably the most flexible regarding word count.
Adult novels (FICTION) should aim for about 75,000 to 90,000 words. However, THAT being said, Westerns and mysteries often run shorter, while the sci-fi and fantasy genre tends to spawn much bigger books. Remember, a great fantasy does NOT have to be 7 books in a series, with each book being over 800 pages long. Sometimes less is more. Some of the masters of the sci-fi AND fantasy genres wrote wonderful books that would be considered basically "novella" length today.
This could end up being a huge article just on word count trends alone, and that's not really the point. The point is this: pick a word count to aim for. It's your goal for this book, for this month.
For our young writers out there, we suggest 20,000 words. If you were to have a book by the end of NaNoWriMo that was 20,000 words, and you started writing TODAY, Sunday, November 2nd, 2014, then you would need to write about 700 words each day to reach that goal by the end of the month.
I've heard most of you talk. I've seen how much you can write -- on papers, in notebooks, saved on your flash drives, on facebook, on wattpad. If you took away ONE hour of messing around on the computer, or playing a video game, or torturing your younger brother, or whining about cleaning the bathroom, and instead dedicated that to cranking out 700 words of your story, you would have a great draft DONE at the end of November.
AND, to entice you, to encourage you, From My Shelf is offering you rewards.
So, sign up for NaNoWriMo, for young writers, at http://ywp.nanowrimo.org/how-does-nanowrimo-work-for-young-writers
Then tell us that you signed up. Better yet, email us at from_my_shelf@yahoo.com or stop in to sign up at the bookstore. We will check in with you each week to see your progress. If you've hit a slump, we'll encourage you to keep going! If you missed a few days, we won't let you give up! Maybe you'll only get 10,000 words done -- as if we'd ever say "ONLY!" to that accomplishment. If you sign up with us, you won't just have the satisfaction of having finished a book at the end of the month! We will also provide you with REWARDS and PRIZES, including some really fun pens and writing tools!
So, get started! Choose which story idea you're going to work on: don't think too hard about it, or that will become an excuse not to get started at all. Pick one. The others will be waiting!! Now, write a new paragraph. Then another. Then another. 700 words is less than one full typed page.
By the way, this blog was 836 words.
