Our guest author today is Larry
Brill. Larry spent
25 years as a TV news anchor and reporter, picking up numerous awards along the
way. After leaving the business in 2000 to set up a video and marketing
consulting business, Larry penned his first novel, Live At Five, a
gentle lampooning of the TV news business. His second novel The Patterer,
carries the same theme back in time to explore how today’s news clichés might
play to an 18th century London theater audience.
How One Writer Beat the Distractions Trap
or
Confessions of a Fiction Procrastinator
This should
be a great week to put in some serious time and finger grease on my latest
novel-in-progress. (Would it still be elbow grease if your effort were confined
to typing?) I am between projects in my “day job” as a creative director and
video producer, so I have plenty of time on my hands to write fiction. Therein
lies my downfall. Too much time and no specific deadline is Kryptonite to my
writing.
Which is why
I hate Facebook. And Twitter. And email. And the Internet in general. They are the
thieves I face whenever I sit down at my computer. This week I also hate clear,
blue sunny skies in need of admiring, lawns in need of mowing, and cats in need
of a good scratching. In other words, I hate all the distractions that pull me
away from my story. There are so many and I am, by nature, a serial
procrastinator.
You see, I work out of a home office with one computer for all my personal and
business needs. It’s convenient in so many ways, except. Except that Work
(capital W) I do in the daytime frequently spills over into the evening, while
taking care of bills and budgets and other household “paper” chores frequently
encroaches on the hours I should be attending to the clients’ needs. And lost
in the midst of juggling all that, multi-tasking in the worst possible sense,
is the time I need for fiction.
When I wrote
my first novel, Live At Five, I was
still working a morning shift at the NBC affiliate here in Austin. It was a lot
easier to schedule time for fiction back then because I had a routine. Get up
and go to work. Come home and complete tasks that fall into the category of
life maintenance. And the hours between dinner and bed were reserved for
writing. Fewer dinners out, no TV and no DVD. The schedule was set and I
blocked off the hours (unofficial but fairly rigid) to find time for work, life
and fiction. [LiveAtFiveSmlpic}
Now, without
that structure, it feels like I’m painting, as if I’m smearing colors, one for
each of those parts of life, onto a single canvas. They all run over each other
and blend into one. I’m not whining, it’s a beautiful bit of art, my life is,
but like an abstract painting it’s hard to focus on any one element. And when I
can’t focus on fiction, both my writing and I suffer.
Which is why
I love the National Novel Writers Month. If you haven’t yet heard of it, NaNoWriMo is a thirty-day challenge that starts
on November 1st and runs through November 30th. Your mission, should you choose
to accept it, is to write a 50,000 word novel in that time. You can register
online, and each day that you add words to your novel you upload them to the
site to keep track of your progress. You can set up a buddy list to monitor
each other’s progress and egg each other on. And there are a number of other
ways they inspire you to keep at it.
It’s like
having a deadline on steroids.
1,666 words a
day (average) to make the grade.
And the best
part? The words don’t really matter. It’s quantity versus quality. Though in
the two times I’ve taken up the challenge, both successful, I found that, for
the purposes of a first draft, some of my best prose came out of a wild stream
of consciousness under the threat of missing my deadline.
The NaNoWriMo
challenge forces me back into the kind of writing schedule that has helped me
not only complete, but publish two well-reviewed novels. For some reason, the
discipline that I lack eleven moths out of the year takes a vacation every
November. And so does the serial procrastinator inside me.
Larry is giving away a signed paperback to a US resident, or if you're an ereader, you can choose to get a pdf, whether you're in the U.S. or international, so leave a comment. Then zip over to Larry's website to learn more about him and his books.
