The Office of Letters and Light Blog

Fighting Injustice with the Harry Potter Alliance

Through the Harry Potter Alliance (yes, such a magical thing exists!), Harry Potter fans can do more than read and re-read the books; they can turn fiction into reality through social activism. Executive director and co-founder Andrew Slack tells us how NaNoWriMo and HPA are working together for good through their Accio Books! campaign: 

According to the HPA website, “The Harry Potter Alliance fights the Dark Arts in the real world.” Tell us more about how HPA accomplishes this.

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"When you were a little kid, you probably read a picture book with a title like The Jobs People Do. And the jobs were teacher, doctor, police officer, and the guy who sells you ice cream. But out here in the real world there are also chicken sexers, forensic accountants, perfume designers, and thousands of other professions you’ve never heard of. The real world is full of gnarly details, and whenever you think you have a handle on how complex something is, it just gets gnarlier.

This inherent gnarliness of things is an opportunity. When your writing starts to run out of steam, dare to ask, “Where is my novel too simple?"

— Scott Westerfeld, on writing complexity into your stories.

NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: The Value of Life Experience

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Nathan Bransford, author of the Jacob Wonderbar series, and blogger extraordinaire reminds us why living has to come before writing:

• S – Size Up the Situation
• U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
• R – Remember Where You Are
• V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
• I – Improvise
• V – Value Living
• A – Act Like the Natives
• L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

Writing, by its very nature, is a solitary activity. It requires blocking out the world around you, surrounding yourself only with your own thoughts, and swimming and diving through the oceans of your imagination.

It’s also a tremendously time-consuming activity, one that requires blocking off days on the calendar when you would much prefer to be out doing something far easier than pouring your heart out onto the page. You have to focus, power through when the writing gets hard, and above all, make sacrifices to complete a novel.

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"The most common refrain from those of us who are grappling with sluggish stories and dwindling mojo is that we’re just feeling Blah. Our stories are Blah, our writing is Blah. We’ve spent the last two weeks mining our creative depths, and many of us have emerged with too few diamonds and way too many lumps of coal.

Trust the process. If you’re doubting yourself or your story, just keep moving forward. Every year, authors who press on to 50K are treated to the electric moment when the tangle of plots and people we dropped into the first half of our books end up forming unexpected connections. Themes develop. Arcs emerge. Things crackle, then hum, and, at the very end of the month, enough circuits connect that the whole story lights up with a bookish glow."

— Chris Baty, on writing through the “blah”s.

Getting Through Camp With a Little Help From Your Friends

One great feature about Camp NaNoWriMo is the ability to get to know  the fellow writers in your virtual cabin. Now, you may be asking: Just what is a virtual cabin? And will you look the other way on any inter-cabin prank wars?

Think of Camp NaNoWriMo cabins as your personal, kick-butt writing group during the month. Up to six writers are grouped together to chat and keep an eye on each other’s word count. (You can find out how to be sorted into one over at Camp News!)

If you’re already in one, you may be wondering what the next steps are. Fortunately, your fellow campers have come up with some amazingly creative ways to get the most out of their cabins, and I’d like to share some of my favorite ways with you:

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NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: Improvising, or How to Fake It ‘Til You Make It

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Therese Walsh, author of The Last Will of Moira Leahy and cofounder of Writer Unboxed tells us how improvisation can be an essential tool in the writer’s toolbox :

• S – Size Up the Situation
• U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
• R – Remember Where You Are
• V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
• I – Improvise
• V – Value Living
• A – Act Like the Natives
• L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

Whose Line is it Anyway? is one of my favorite television shows; I’m always amazed at the skill of these improvisers as they craft an entertaining story from scratch within minutes. Their philosophy and techniques can help you, too, as you write your draft in record time. Here’s how:

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"Don’t look at this early stage for every sentence to be perfect—that will come. Don’t expect every description to be spot-on. That will come, too. This is an opportunity to experiment. It’s your giant blotter. An empty slate, ready to be filled. It’s an opportunity to try out dialogue, to create situations, to describe a summer’s evening. You’ll read it back to yourself and you’ll see what works, you’ll see what doesn’t. But this is a building site, and it’s not meant to be pretty, tidy, or even safe. Building sites rarely are.

But every great building began as one."

— Jasper Fforde, on why becoming a writer requires practice.

"Writers spend something like 97% of their time in The Middle. Once you leave those first pages, those first days… you wander into strange land and you stay there for a long, long time.

And once you’ve crossed The Middle once or twice and you’re lounging on the other side, you’ll find you miss it. You’ll realize you long to be out there again, under the sky and the stars. The weather changes a lot in the middle. Some days, the skies are dark and it’s hard to find your way forward. Those days are long and little progress is made. Some days, it’s strangely bright and clear, and suddenly you can see the horizon ahead, and dozens of possible paths present themselves to you. But every day is different, and every day there is a new way to go and a new thing to see…"

— Maureen Johnson, on the joys of being immersed in your story.

NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: Planning to Vanquish Writing Panic

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Our very own Michael Adamson, a valiant intern here at Camp HQ expounds on V — Vanquish Fear and Panic:

• S – Size Up the Situation
• U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
• R – Remember Where You Are
• V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
• I – Improvise
• V – Value Living
• A – Act Like the Natives
• L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

Picture yourself upon a mountaintop.

The wind is howling. Your mind is tired. Your body is exhausted. You wonder what madness drove you here. Your route back to camp is a winding, precarious trail down the mountainside. The skies begin to darken. You are miles from safety. Out there in the distance, a wildcat does growl….

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"All of us harbor secret hopes that a magnificent novel will tumble out of the sky and appear on our screens, but almost universally, writing is hard, slow, and totally unglamorous. So why finish what you’ve started? Because when you are done, you will be grateful for the experience. Also, you will have learned a lot about writing and humanness and the inestimable value of tilting at windmills.

Whether you’re reading or writing, there is nothing magical about how you get from the middle of a book to the end of one. As Robert Frost put it, “The only way out is through.” So go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel."

— John Green, on defying creative despair.

NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: Remember Your Writing Journey is Just Beginning

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Joanna Penn from The Creative Penn tackles ‘R’ — Remember Where You Are:

• S – Size Up the Situation
• U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
• R – Remember Where You Are
• V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
• I – Improvise
• V – Value Living
• A – Act Like the Natives
• L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

I took part in my first NaNoWriMo when I was an avid reader but didn’t have much of a clue about writing fiction. I ‘failed’ that year, but from that mess came the seed of my first novel, Pentecost. Fast forward a few years and I’ve sold over 55,000 copies of my first three books, and have just finished my fourth novel, which I started during NaNoWriMo last year. 

Your writing life will change over time, but if you’re just starting out, here’s where you are right now:

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NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: Take the Time to Know Your Characters

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke from Chick Lit Is Not Dead tackle ‘U’ — Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste:

• S – Size Up the Situation
• U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
• R – Remember Where You Are
• V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
• I – Improvise
• V – Value Living
• A – Act Like the Natives
• L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

They say two heads are better than one. And in our case, we must agree! You see, even though we went to the same high school and college, have names that sound similar and write identical narratives, our writing process could not be more different. And while that difference may have caused some pretty major girlfights early on„ it’s now something we celebrate. (Well, most of the time anyway…)

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