Musings

[Blog] Takeaways from NaNo2022

Faith Hakimian

Well, look at that. Another November has come and gone, and a whole bunch of writers have emerged once more from their caves and coffee shops to blink owlishly and try to remember what life is like without an aggressively looming deadline. And, if they’re anything like me, they’re also feeling a heady mix of relief and something a little like sadness that it’s all over.

According to the NaNoWriMo website, this was my thirteenth time participating and my twelfth time reaching the 50K goal, so there’s clearly something about this event that keeps me coming back. Mostly, it’s probably the fact that it gives you “permission” to write some truly terrible prose in an effort to get enough words down on the page to do something with them later, which is something that I struggle with during the rest of the year. Also, the look on people’s faces when I cackle softly to myself and mutter something about writing alllll the words is pretty fun, too.

Generally speaking, I’ve tended pretty strongly towards pantsing it that whole time, too, with last year being the notable exception/paradigm shift in my writing strategy generally. So, naturally, I’d hoped to plan again this year; I even had my beautiful blank outlines all set up!

And then I ran out of time. And the first day of November was here. And my outline was most emphatically not.

Which leads me to the rest of this post and what new things I’ve learned about myself as a writer.

Now that I’ve tried it, I much prefer working with a plan than without one.

This one surprises me a bit. Because for years, I gleefully embraced the chaos of writing with No Plan and only the faintest inkling of where to go. Characters made decisions and caused trouble. Plots spiraled and careened and dead-ended and reappeared out of nowhere like squirrels that got into a big bag of espresso beans. I felt free to write whatever the heck I wanted with absolutely no concern as to whether it made sense or not.

If pressed, I can still do that. That’s basically what I did this year, though with admittedly a bit more of a roadmap to go off of than some of my other projects. I knew the themes I want for this particular story, and I had several solid scene ideas that I wanted to get down. But the overarching movement of the story? Not so much. Which, on a related note, is probably why my 50K devolved very quickly into a bunch of random scenes and descriptions with little to no linear cohesion.

But for the whole month, I had to fight the feeling that I didn’t have a story so much as a setting. NaNo always feels like something that gets you a Draft Zero– something that’s such a wild jumble that other rough drafts look at it and squeak in dismay. After having my last project at least follow some semblance of a plot, that feeling was even stronger for this one, which was actually rather disheartening.

Frustrating as it was, it was also helpful to write without a plan.

The biggest trouble/pitfall/danger of writing with a careful outline is that it can be really, really easy to lean into a bunch of lazy clichés in order to tick off all the boxes that You’re Supposed To. And if you’re coming at it from the outline first, before you even start writing, the temptation is only going to be stronger. At least, that’s what I’ve found for myself: “Ah, yes, it’s the end of Act II and time for the all-is-lost moment. Clearly I must kill off my main character’s best friend.”

But what I found when I had to just write without having those pivotal plot points already mapped out was that some of the ideas that fell out onto the screen were better than anything I was going to come up with while staring at a blank outline that needed filling in. They still need tweaking and a lot of work (and probably a ruthless editor) to get them as good as I want them to be, but the bones are good, I think. Really good. Good enough that I’m really excited about the possibilities.

I’m not burned out on the story.

This one. Huh. I can’t remember ever getting to the end of November and not just wanting to set the document (and all its backups) on fire. Or at least to close it and pretend it doesn’t exist for a month or two. And really, I don’t know if this is a side effect of free-styling it or just where my head is at the moment, but the fact remains that I am legitimately excited to go back now that I have the luxury of time and work on fitting the raw material I wrote in November into the outline I didn’t manage to make beforehand.

Because I think there’s a chance that it’s going to be even better than if I did it the other way ’round.

Outlining last year changed the way I write without an outline.

I think the best way to explain this is to say that planning or outlining or whatever you want to call it is another tool in the writing chest, and I can get at least some of the benefits even without going whole hog on it. The exercise of writing and (more or less) sticking to an outline last year got me thinking about structure and writing in a way I hadn’t practiced, and that’s made it easier to see where the random scenes that spilled out last month might fit into a cohesive whole.

I think– I hope– that that means I’m a better writer. A more focused one, at least. More experienced. And that’s pretty cool.

Anyway.

If you participated, how did your NaNo projects go? Really well? Not so well? Really… different? Feel free to drop a line in the comments! In the meantime, I’m gonna go try to get some work done on any of my at least half a dozen neglected writing projects. Like Tanner and Miranda.

Happy December, y’all!

Musings

[Blog] November check-in

Faith Hakimian

Hello friends! Not much to report this time around. It’s November 9 and I am, predictably, knee-deep (or possibly neck-deep) in NaNoWriMo. It’s going well so far! Well. As well as NaNo ever does, which is to say the words that are gushing into my document are disjointed and confused but occasionally good enough that I can convince myself that I might, actually, know what I’m doing. I am regretting the fact that I didn’t have time to plan this one out like I did last year’s project, as I suspect it would be making a number of things significantly easier, but the little bit I had structured out in my head is holding pretty steady, and I’m liking a lot of the possibilities with this project. So yay!

Musings

[Blog] Where does the time go?

Faith Hakimian

So, apparently, November begins in less than a week. Goodness.

Naturally (read: Faith is addicted and can’t really help herself), this means that I have less than a week to get herself in a passable headspace for NaNoWriMo. The good news is that I do know what project I will be working on, and I have at least a modicum of planning done to help me through. The bad(?) news is that between… everything, but especially starting a new job in a new state and all that, I haven’t done nearly the amount of planning I did for last year’s NaNo.

Which maybe isn’t entirely bad?

I still love what planning out a novel in advance can bring to the table. And it’s not like I’m going into this completely blind– in fact, I’ve got a decent idea what I want the main beats for the story to look like. But aside from that? It’s all a blank page. And that’s an excitement all its own.

Musings

[Blog] Detours

Faith Hakimian

Anyone in the business of storytelling will tell you that conflict is what makes a story a story. It drives the action. It moves the characters and makes them fight for what they want. It makes them grow as (fictional) people. It’s what gives us the compelling stories that capture our imaginations.

And while it’s not a perfect correlation, a lot of us could also tell you that when those bumps appear in our own lives, they’re opportunities for us just like they are for our characters. Trouble is, knowing that doesn’t always make it any easier emotionally to handle those disappointments. Not when something takes you in a different direction than you expected to be going. Not when it feels like your slow, steady climb towards your goal has taken a sudden turn to the left. Not when you start questioning whether you made some mistake along the way that will delay you terribly if not prevent you entirely from reaching where you thought you were going.

Is this melodramatic? At least a little. (I write fiction for fun; what were you expecting?) Do I have a marginally unhealthy expectation that my life will follow a roughly sensible character arc, with obvious steps forwards and backwards, all moving towards a single concrete goal? Possibly. Oops. But can I still take advice from my favorite characters? Absolutely. Especially when all of them keep pushing through when there’s no easy way to get where they want to be.

Musings

[Blog] Revisiting Old Reads

Faith Hakimian

A couple of months ago, I listened to Delia Owens’ beautiful novel Where the Crawdads Sing. Aside from thoroughly enjoying it in its own right, it also reminded me of another novel: A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter. This is not particularly surprising. Both stories follow a young girl with a strong attachment to the surrounding swamp/marsh, a knack for collecting remarkable specimens, and a less-than-ideal home life. So, once reminded of Limberlost and how much I’d enjoyed reading it as a kid, it seemed like a good idea to revisit it.

Now, I don’t actually remember how old I was when I read Limberlost. I was young. Possibly very young, but I really couldn’t say. The book was gifted to me by a dear friend who had also enjoyed reading it when she was a kid, and rightly figured that I would as well. I bring this up because upon picking it up again, I was a little surprised to find that it was not quite what I remembered. Blame it on my tastes maturing and me growing up. That’s not to say it’s bad, per se, but it certainly doesn’t carry the same nuance that the books I most appreciate now do.

Another point worth bringing up: I have absolutely nothing against rereading books. In fact, I’m of the opinion that the best books are the ones that you get more out of every time you read them. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit at least three times each, and probably more. I recently returned to the Touchstone trilogy by Andrea K. Höst and have every intention of doing it again. And there’s so many others. Like Frankenstein, which I didn’t particularly enjoy the first time but want to see if I get something more and different out of it now that I’m older. Or Fahrenheit 451 which I did enjoy both times I read it. Or a dozen others that come to mind without my having to think about it all that hard.

But not every book needs to be reread. And not every book needs to be reread by everyone who read it once. Especially not when we’ve all got more books we want to read for the first time than we can reasonably expect to get through in one lifetime. With more written every day.

With this in mind, it’s reasonable to ask why I’m bothering to finish this read-through. With so many things I want to read that I haven’t touched yet, why spend the time to reread something when I’m already not finding the same wonderment between its pages that I did the first time? There’s several reasons, of course. And fortunately, this isn’t one of those questions with a right or wrong answer.

In this case, the easiest answer is that it’s a mix of curiosity and nostalgia. Curiosity because I want to see if reading through to the end again lets me find now what I found then. Nostalgia because while I don’t remember many of the finer details of the story, I very much remember how it made me feel. And, I suppose, I want to spend a little while with the person I was when I was a kid, and maybe to . The slightly more cynical answer is that I want to poke at the story to figure out why I feel differently about it now. Both answers have at least a grain or two of truth.

As of the writing of this post, I’m about halfway through my read of Limberlost. It’s going relatively quickly, and the fact that it isn’t a terrible slog certainly helps. Whatever else it is, it’s not a difficult read. It’s also proving more enjoyable than I was afraid it would, though whether that’s because of my own revised expectations or the story itself gaining its feet I couldn’t say. Possibly, too, finding out when it was written helped shift my view as well; the book is more than a hundred years old, and reading it almost more as a piece of history than with the critical eye I might turn on a piece of contemporary fiction has its merits.

At this point I really have no idea how I’ll feel about it by the time I finish. Certainly right now I don’t regret picking it up again. Just as certainly, though, the experience is entirely different than the one I was expecting. But then, I’m tempted to say that’s one of the best reasons to reread something at all.

Musings

[Blog] The Science in Sci-fi

Faith Hakimian

For those of you who have been following this blog/reading the stories that show up here every now and again, you’ve probably noticed that, despite the fact that I’m more than happy to use the shorthand of “science fiction” for the genre of number of them, even though it would usually be far more accurate to go with “space opera” instead.

And that’s okay! A perfectly valid choice. I love space opera, and despite the distinction I made above, I have no problem throwing it under the broad umbrella of sci-fi, if only because the popular understanding of the term often boils down to “adventure in space”. Overly simplistic? Definitely. Helpful enough? Yes.

All this to say that I’m lately finding a ton of enjoyment in actually reading up on various topics pertinent to the worlds I enjoy creation. Like, for example, The Case For Mars by Robert Zubrin, a book that presents the argument that we could actually put human beings on Mars within ten years using technology that already exists or could be developed in that time period. Aside from being a fascinating read all on its own, the number of ideas the book is giving me for the Tanner and Miranda stories is nothing to sniff at. From a general history of how humans made it out to colonize other planets to the infrastructure that they would have set up on all their colonies, including Verdant, it’s giving me the tools to help fill out the universe of the stories.

AND IT’S SO MUCH FUN.

Does this mean I want to turn the Tanner and Miranda stories into hard science fiction? Heck no. I’d be the first person to tell you my favorite part of writing about their shenanigans is exactly that: the shenanigans. But if drawing from the real world science (ish) that relates to the setting I’ve created helps me create a more immersive fictional world, gives me more ideas and, forces me to come up with interesting and different answers to the questions raised by the plot, then I am all for it.

Musings

[Blog] Settling In

Faith Hakimian

Slowly but surely, I’m settling in. This last week in particular has seen me neck deep in boxes, with the end result being a (mostly) unpacked room. After all the chaos of moving, it’s so nice to have a space that’s starting to feel more like my own.

I’ve also been managing more writing! It’s a slow slog back to where I want to be, but it’s definitely progress. So far, most of the words have been more a random scattering of ideas than anything connected to a specific project, but it’s proving to be a decent way to get myself back into the practice of regular writing, so I’m more than happy to go with it.

Also! Since deadlines and I seem to get along so well, and since September is starting tomorrow, it seems like the perfect time to give myself a wordcount goal for Tanner and Miranda. If all goes to plan, expect to see snippets from my work on their next adventure in the coming weeks. Until then, all the best!

Musings

[Blog] More Musing on Setting

Faith Hakimian

As I adjust to a different set of surroundings, I find myself once again thinking about the way a story’s setting affects everything else about it. And wondering how much the habitat of any given writer affects the stories they create. I don’t think it’s an absolute thing– certain projects I’ve worked on in recent years (while living in Southern California) have clearly taken inspiration from the Idahoan hills I grew up in– but I suspect that the high desert I’ve been so near for the past few years has worked its way into my imagination. At least, I think I recognize the tiniest shreds of the Mojave in the barren plains that keep supplying Tanner and Miranda with their adventures. And I imagine there are some wildly colorful stretches of Utah that will make an appearance as well, now that I’ve driven through it.

So maybe it’s not so much about where the writer is at any given time. Maybe it’s more about where they have been, what different places have seeded themselves in their minds. And if you spend more time in a place it has more time to make itself at home in the corners of your imagination. It’s why I suspect the various space stations that exist half-imagined in my note-heap bear a striking resemblance to both Los Angeles and Yerevan.

And yet. Sometimes it doesn’t take that long at all. Sometimes, all you need is a flash. Wilderness illuminated by the untamed, untameable summer storm that finally caught you. Or the red-sand expanse that spreads beneath a great, blue sky and takes your breath away. Or the water, impossibly still, that reflects the desert mountains in stranger perfection because the sand has forgotten what to do with the rain.

Musings

[Blog] I return!

Faith Hakimian

In truth, I should have known better. Than to think I would manage even my reduced blog schedule while in the process of moving. Or, in other words, I did not intentionally skip posting for the entire month of July, yet here we are. In August.

Weird.

Unsurprisingly, this also means I haven’t really managed much in the way of fiction writing, either, though I’m gearing back up with that (and even pumped out several hundred words for Tanner and Miranda just last week!) and am eagerly looking forward to settling into a stable writing schedule once again.

In the meantime, some highlights from the past month:

  • My first visit to Yosemite, complete with a hike up El Capitan
  • Spending over a week with my family back in my hometown
  • A grand roadtrip comprising of more than 4500 miles, epic scenery, and all the summer storms I’d forgotten about because they don’t happen in California
  • Opportunities to catch up with various friends I hadn’t seen in Way Too Long

At some point I’ll definitely upload some of the pictures I took in Yosemite before the smoke descended; with absolutely no exaggeration, that park is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. But that will have to come a different day. Today, I’m just going to have to be satisfied with a quick post to infuse a little life back into this blog– and the fact that I’ve actually got the energy to do some writing tonight.

Musings

[Blog] Change

Faith Hakimian

In my last post I mentioned that I’m getting ready for a big move. By its nature, that of course means that I’m gearing up for some massive changes. (Insert quote here about the only constant in life being change yadda yadda yadda.) What I don’t think I said in that post, though, was the fact that while it’s hardly the first time I’ve dealt with big changes, it is the first time I can recall that I’ve left someplace while it would still be significantly more comfortable to stay…

… and I think that’s a good thing.

Let me try to explain that statement a little. For one thing, it’s important to say here that I don’t mean to say that it hasn’t been hard to leave a job before; I’ve been very blessed in my employment opportunities and between amazing coworkers and great workplace environments, moving on has always been a bittersweet experience, though often one tinged by the awareness that I may have stayed “too long”. To put it another way, I tend to prefer a cautious route through life, and that preference has most definitely been reflected in the way I’ve gone from job to job.

Which has its benefits! And frankly, of the two proverbial ditches on either side of this particular road, I’m inclined to think it’s better to crash into this one than the other. But that being said, it’s still a ditch. And if I can manage to avoid it, too, that would be even better.

And that, in part, is why I do think this move is a good thing. Terrifying. But good. Because it will force me to grow. And it opens up new doors. And has the potential to put me closer to where I want to be careerwise. If only because it’s going to cut out enough to allow for new things to grow. I can only hope it works as well for me as it does for the roses I used to take care of at another old job.