The Office of Letters and Light Blog

Your Brain on NaNoWriMo

We’ve heard many tales over the years from Wrimos who tap into realms of intuition and imagination as they write during NaNoWriMo. It turns out that there might be an actual change in our brains as we write with reckless abandon. Charles Limb, a doctor and musician who studies how creativity works in the brain suggests that turning off your “inner editor” opens up a flow of expression. Read on!

Tell us what you discovered when you studied the brain activity of improvisational jazz musicians?

Charles Limb: In our study, musicians played a tune they had memorized and then a tune they invented on the spot, and we observed their brain activity using brain-imaging techniques. With the shift to improvisation, a region of the brain associated with careful planning and self-censorship called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex became dormant, while parts of the brain connected to the senses—hearing, seeing, feeling—became especially lively.

Most interesting, a brain area linked to autobiographical storytelling also showed increased activity. When jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition—and turn on those that let self-expression flow. Essentially, a musician shuts down his inhibitions and lets his inner voice shine through.

I guess the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is what we unscientifically call “the inner editor.”

Limb: That’s not such a bad phrase. The real key is that it’s not just a single cluster of neurons that is that editor, but a whole region.

Do you think your findings about improvisational jazz could apply to improvising in writing as well?

Read More

Introduction and Recipe for One OLL Intern

Hello, campers! I’m Ben, your new OLL intern, and summer camp counselor!

I’ve spent much of my life working at one summer camp or another, but this one may be the strangest. I’ve worked at space camp and adventure theater camp, but I’ve never worked at a camp where I only meet the campers online before! I’m thrilled to be here, and eager to help with Camp NaNo. Areas of my expertise include fireside storytelling, surviving camp food, avoiding dehydration, handling homesickness, and of course pranking other cabins.

Wondering what makes an OLL intern? Read on for the recipe below:

Recipe for One Letters and Light Intern

Read More

“Bye Bye Bye” - N’Sync

Well, today is my last day as an intern here at Script Frenzy. When I think about it, it’s amazing how much my life has changed in the duration of just four months. There have been a lot of transitions: leaving my apartment to move back home, leaving UC Berkeley, and now leaving the Office of Letters and Light. However, I know all these endings will lead to new beginnings. 

Read More

A Frenzied Festival of Plays

Educator Cynthia Garcia doesn’t just teach noveling or scriptwriting to one class at her school in Fairmont, WV. She brings both NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy to the whole student body. We always love her enthusiasm and were excited to hear how her April went. Here’s what she told us about the school’s first ever “Frenzy Festival.”

April was pretty chaotic at our school. Between Easter break, spring break, standardized testing, and “weather days” (Fridays off of school to substitute for the snow days we had built into our calendar but didn’t use), we only had a handful of actual school days all month.

Two years ago, I might have figured April for a lost month, but that was before two NaNoWriMos and a Script Frenzy. I knew better. I put up my “Script Frenzy is Coming!” posters in March, sent for my classroom kit, and let the buzz begin.

Read More

“I Sold My NaNoWriMo Novel!” A Q&A with Marissa Meyer

We are thrilled to introduce Marissa Meyer, long-time Wrimo and YA fiction writer, who joins us to talk about her debut novel, Cinder, which came out in January from Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan.

Can you tell us a bit about Cinder?

Of course! Cinder is a retelling of the classic Cinderella story, but with a science-fiction twist. Our heroine, Cinder, is a sixteen-year-old cyborg, meaning she’s part-human and part-machine. In a world where cyborgs are considered second-class citizens, Cinder earns her keep in her stepmother’s household by working as a mechanic at the weekly market. Her reputation brings the handsome Prince Kai to her booth one day, and soon Cinder is caught in a political battle of wills between Earth and the Lunars—an evolved species of humans who live on the moon and have developed powers of mind-control and manipulation.

Cinder is the first of what will be a four-book series called The Lunar Chronicles, each of which is inspired by a different fairy tale. Book 2: Scarlet, based on Little Red Riding Hood, will be out in January.

What’s the connection between NaNoWriMo and Cinder?

Read More

Later Guys!

Today is my final day interning at the Office of Letters and Light, which is pretty nuts considering it feels like it was just last week that Tim asked me to write my introductory blog post. I can’t believe that Script Frenzy and all of its writing madness is already over, and that my time with OLL has come to an end. But despite the brevity of my internship, I’ve had a ton of fun working with the OLL staff, and I’ve gotten a taste of what it means to work at a nonprofit.

Read More

Didn’t Finish the Script Frenzy Challenge? It’s OK, We Tried

In middle school, I had a science teacher who, if you didn’t turn in your homework for the day, would make you stand up in front of the whole class and give a reason why. Of course, science was never my strong point, so, at least once a week, I would have to stand and explain where my homework was. Now that I think about it, maybe this was my first brush with creating fiction.

I never went with the classic, “My dog ate it,” but did try to explain my lack of homework with excuses such as: “My soda exploded on it,” “I left it at the library,” or “My mom threw it away”. Those are believable, right?

Anyway, what I’m trying to get at here is that excuses are for excruciatingly boring homework assignments, and maybe work—not for the mad joy of Script Frenzy. And because of that, I admit with a clear conscience that I didn’t finish my script this April. Unfortunately, I fell about sixty pages short.

Read More

Embrace the Geek

Last week, I went to the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo for the first time. It was, in fact, my first real “con” experience, at least of that scale. I’d contemplated going before, but when they announced a full reunion of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation I was finally sucked in.

It feels appropriate that it was TNG that got me to a con, since that show was really my first foray into geek culture. These days, I sort of dabble in the pool of full-fledged fan geekery; I don’t read comic books or dress up for movie premieres (except for the brown coat I wore to the opening night of Serenity), but I will get fanatically attached to certain TV shows and am pretty literate in internet geekery.

Read More

Script Frenzy end-of-event stats: Hot off the press!

The sixth year of the Frenzy had a combined total of 20,284 Frenzy adult and Young Writers Program scriptwriters who wrote 356,622 pages from all around the world. We had eleven fantastic Cameo writers, who shared tips about everything from adapting a feature script into a TV show to rewriting and selling a script.

I loved reviewing the Frenzy stats so much that I thought I’d share them with you, too! I’m going to make this a regular practice from here on out because digging into these numbers is just so juicy! I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

General Stats

For Script Frenzy main:

• 16,358 Frenzy participants.
• Wrote 312,363 pages.
• This averaged out to 19 pages per person.
• We had 1,832 winners, which gave us an 11% win rate. 

For Script Frenzy’s Young Writers Program:

Read More

Cutting Back on Online TV

Since going off to college I haven’t had access to a television. At first, I thought it was going to be great: I figured I’d end up wasting less time being brainwashed by commercials and nonsense like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and instead spend my time doing something more positive (like going outside!). Unfortunately, that’s not how it went down. As soon as I went off to school, I discovered Hulu and Netflix’s Watch Instantly, a.k.a. the kryptonite of productivity.

It started out small. I used to visit Hulu once a week to catch up on 30 Rock, or Lost; it was when my friend told me that I could stream full-length movies and entire TV series on Netflix that things really got out of control. Before I knew it, I was watching all sorts of shows and movies online that I didn’t even care about. I began following mediocre series out of boredom. Now it’s gotten to the point where I can’t get dressed in the morning without watching The Daily Show or The Colbert Report online. I feel a need for constant passive entertainment.

Read More

Camp NaNoWriMo?! What’s that?

What is Camp NaNoWriMo, you say? Well, I’ll tell you! Launched in 2011, Camp NaNoWriMo is a pared down, camp-themed, non-November version of the 50K-in-a-month NaNoWriMo noveling challenge.

For anyone out there who can’t possibly wait until November to write their next novel—or for whom November is not a noveling possibility—Camp NaNoWriMo provides that same hard deadline and abundance of encouragement to get you from “blank page” to “rough draft” in one month.

Camp NaNoWriMo 2012 is running two month-long sessions for you to bash out the rough draft of your novel(s): in June, and then in August. Pick a month—or participate in both—to write while paddling a virtual canoe or in a web-based cabin, novel next to an invisible bear while eating imaginary marshmallows, or in the middle of a purely fictitious sack race! You can do all this and more at campnanowrimo.org.

Read More

Unusual, Intriguing Novel Narration

I just finished reading Hannah Pittard’s 2011 novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way. It’s a naturally intriguing story: a 16-year-old girl goes missing without a trace, and her suburban classmates obsessively speculate—in both the short and long term—about what may have happened to her.

Pittard’s choice of perspective makes this narrative even more absorbing. The entire book is told in the first-person plural: the collective voice of the boys who dreamily wonder about the girl’s fate.

We interrogated each other for information, eager to be the one to discover the truth. As it turned out, we’d all seen Nora the day before, but seen her in different places doing different things—we’d seen her at the swing sets, at the riverbank, in the shopping mall. We’d seen her making phone calls in the telephone booth outside the liquor store, inside the train station, behind the dollar store.

The result is wonderfully opaque. A plural perspective can never be definitively pinned down, and so the narrative drifts and bobs—as elusive and unreliable as the certainty of Nora’s circumstances.

What books have you read that make use of unusual perspective or narration? Have you tried this technique in your own novels? How did it work for you?

– Chris