A wave of weary regret washes over me every time I think about the website I left behind. WriterInside.com has been around for almost four years now, but I have taken so little care of it lately that it has become stale and malnourished. Unfortunately, my own writing has suffered the same fate. In the midst of life, family, and career, I have let the writer inside me slip into a hole, where he’s been hibernating for close to a year.

Maybe it’s not quite accurate to say he’s been hibernating. Perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that I kicked him into a well, and he’s been screaming, clawing, and scratching to get out ever since.

Well, this past week, I finally lowered the bucket and helped my inner writer back to the surface. Deep in the darkest corner of the Texas Tech library, I shut myself up in a tiny study carrel, dusted off the old manuscript, reacquainted myself with my characters, and began laying down some words again. My story had been frozen in place for so long that it felt a little awkward moving on to the next scene. The new words didn’t seem to blend with the old, and it took me a while to find my rhythm again. But now that I’ve finally gotten these old, rusty gears a-crankin’ again, I’m beginning to fall in love all over again!

This was the opening line for the novel I started writing on November 5, 2007 for National Novel Writing Month. I started another story on the first of the month, but 6800 words into it, I discovered that it wasn’t worth telling. So on day five, I started from scratch.

For those of you who aren’t aware, National Novel Writing Month is a yearly challenge for writers all over the globe to write 50,000 words of manuscript in 30 days. That amounts to about 1,667 words per day. Participants are encouraged to pound out a manuscript without editing, to leave their “inner editors” behind for one month while they focus on just finishing a first draft.

The good news is that I finished 50,000 words; so, technically, I won NaNoWriMo. But the bad news is that I haven’t finished the manuscript . . . nor do I intend to.

Although I ended up falling in love with my characters, I don’t feel that the story itself is worth telling without some major revisions that I don’t have the energy to make. It would be easier to start from scratch.

My current plan, now that I’ve gained a much greater appreciation for leaving my inner editor in the dust, is to finish up a manuscript that I’ve been working on for a couple of years. I’m already 54,800 words into the manuscript, and the story’s been begging to be told.

I have no choice. I have to tell it.

Wish me luck!

I’m excited and a little nervous about the whole shindig: excited for obvious reasons, but nervous because I still have absolutely no idea what I’m going to write about, so I might have to resort to my backup strategy.

My preferred strategy for NaNoWriMo is to have a plan, and possibly an outline for my book before November 1 arrives, but it’s starting to look like that’s not going to happen. So my backup strategy is just to start with a character in a ridiculous situation and go from there, writing without a plan. This strategy can definitely be fun. It’s exciting to have no idea what lies around the next corner. But it also makes me a little nervous.

Either way, I’m really excited about November, even though I won’t have much of a social life for 30 days. Anyways, if you’re doing NaNoWriMo too, drop me a line and keep in touch!

So there couldn’t be any worse time for me to stack something else on top of my plate, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do in the month of November. As many wannabe writers know, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). In November, psychotic writers all over the globe commit to writing 50,000 pages in only 30 days. (Why couldn’t they have picked a month with 31 days??) That amounts to over 1600 words PER DAY!

NaNoWriMo encourages writers everywhere to stop making excuses and start writing! It also encourages you to ignore your “inner critic” for 30 days and avoid doing any editing at all cost! After all, editing is what draft #2 is for! Will NaNoWriMo result in a literary masterpiece? Probably not! But it will get you started in the right direction.

So if you need a boost, check out nanowrimo.com and join the masses of writers who have decided to stop making excuses. The website has a great community forums section, where you can keep up with other writers who are taking the challenge. The forums are a great source of motivation for everyone crazy enough to put themselves through the ordeal!

So go sign up today and look me up! My user name is craigsoup.

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Find a passage of prose from your favorite author and copy it down onto paper. As you’re doing so, take note of the way the sentences are put together. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to diagram them — although that wouldn’t be a bad exercise.)

After you’ve copied the passage down, I want you to copy it again. But this time, I want you to change all the words while keeping the sentence structure intact. This might be especially useful if you find a passage of similar length from some of your own writing and then rewrite it using the EXACT same sentence structure as the paragraph you’ve just copied. This means it will have almost the exact same number of words, the exact same punctuation, etc. But it will be a completely different story. Here’s an example of a sentence altered in this way:

Original sentence (from Moby Dick): “Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore.”

Exercise sentence: “Now, with rock-bottom interest rates, to invest in the real estate market is as accessible to the novice investor as to participate in an IRA.”

Notice there are some small differences in sentence structure, but the structure of the sentence as a whole remains intact. If you try this technique out with an entire paragraph, you’ll be surprised at how much you can learn!

As you have probably noticed, website updates have been infrequent lately. This is because I’m currently wrestling with a full time job while trying to build up a freelance web design business. And I’m doing all of this in an effort to pay off some high-interest credit card debt. (Credit cards are evil, ladies and gents, don’t be deceived!)

This doesn’t leave much time for writing.

Now, if one of you had said this to me, this is the point where I would jump in and tell you that if you really want to write, you’ll stop making excuses and DO IT. Even if it means only writing a couple of pages per week, you must do something.

And that advice is perfectly sound.

So I’m calling on YOU GUYS to help me! Whenever you get a chance, drop me an email by going to our contact page. Check up on me, tell me to get busy, motivate me, inspire me, tell me why you love to write . . . anything to give me a good, solid kick in the literary rump.

And I’m always here to do the same for you.

P.S. And if you’re feeling extra generous, feel free to explore the “click here to donate” button on the right side of the page.