Dear afashionablefrown,

When Auntie MJ was a Teenaged Auntie MJ, she wanted to drive. My mom didn’t want me to drive, and kept on giving me reasons why the process had to be delayed. One day, when I asked for my learner’s permit (for the twentieth time), she replied, “You can’t get your learner’s permit until you’ve had more practice.”

(Note to anyone unfamiliar with Pennsylvania driving law: a learner’s permit is the thing you get that allows you to practice driving.)

She made this remark by accident, but for me, this beautiful Catch-22 told me all. I was going nowhere.

While this annoyed me greatly at the time, it’s been a useful lesson in how to deal with a draft. This sort of thing, the “I can’t start until I have done XYZ” is common. In this case, you can’t start the writing until you’re finished this outlining, ergo you can never start. You have set up conditions for yourself that have made it permissible never to write your story.

You may start to feel crazy.

Not to fret! This is a common enough problem. Rest assured the same is true of ALL these writing problems: you didn’t invent them. Someone else has had them. Probably someone you really like. The first and most important step in this case is to realize that this is just a trick your fears are playing on you. (You seem to already be aware of this on some level—now you just have to say it loud and clearly.) This whole not being able to start thing? It’s an illusion. Brush it aside. Fling it with great force, if that works better for you. As they say in the Matrix, THERE IS NO SPOON. Here is why:

1. That “vital detail” is a game that never, ever, ever, ever, ever ends. It’s called “writing.”

2. We can draw from that that what you are doing with that outline is WRITING THE FIRST DRAFT. Hooray! Consider it finished. You will find those “vital” details when you get into the next draft.

Really, this is completely psychological. Declare the outline done. If you need to, make a sign that says THE OUTLINE IS DONE and hang it above your desk. Now begin again, fresh, unencumbered, free.

Licensed to drive,

Auntie MJ

Dear erraticartist,

Your question fills Auntie MJ with joy and she happily provides the answer: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. In fact, there is everything RIGHT about that. To write for fun … that’s healthy and quite excellent INDEED.

There is a lot of talk about how the NaNoWriMo books must be rewritten and edited extensively after completion … but this is usually because people ask, “How do I publish my novel?” And that is how you publish a novel. You finish it, and finishing it means rewriting it.

But there is every reason to do NaNoWriMo because writing is GOOD and joyful. Because it allows you to express things you want to express. It’s okay to do it as a game. In fact, it’s great! It is perhaps the BEST reason to do NaNo. It’s really best under ALL conditions to write a book just because you want to. There is no other reason to do it. If you want to write books for money and fame* then you perhaps are barking up the wrong cellphone tower.** There is precious little money or fame to be found in the business. And books written for money and fame tend to feel like books written for money and fame. They have a hollow ring and an empty center.

There is a certain obviousness to books written for money and fame.

Write what you want. Do it for yourself, and if you feel like it, the entertainment of your friends. And if you are one of those people who wants to take it to the next level, then fine. But that first level is a good and beautiful place. And it is the place many people who write for a living try to return to when the deadlines come and the business part starts to feel weird.

So DO YOUR THING, my friend.

With adoration,

Auntie MJ

* Tagline stolen from my friend Scott Westerfeld. And he’s joking, FYI. TO MAKE THIS VERY POINT.

** I’ve never seen a dog bark up a tree. But I do see a lot of those cellphone towers made to look like trees, except they look NOTHING LIKE TREES. I just wanted to bring them to the public’s attention. WE KNOW THEY ARE NOT TREES. STOP TRYING TO FOOL US, BIG TELECOMMUNICATIONS!

lisapizza asked you:

If you have reached the end, CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU! (Or near the end! Or whatever! For the purposes of this answer I must assume that there is some kind of nearness to an end.) First, you must celebrate your achievement.

But you are right. Now, the work starts all over again. In many ways, in begins IN EARNEST, because now you have some material to work with. This is hard work, but rewarding. For many people, this is where the fun starts.

Writing, of course, is rewriting. I know, I know. You’ve heard it. But it’s true. Now that you’ve written it once, you really have to write it again. You might write it a few times. It may have taken 30 days to produce what you have now, but there is no telling how long this next part will take.

But FEAR NOT. Auntie MJ has tips. TIPS, mind you. Not instructions. How you do this is totally up to you, and everyone writes in their own way. But these are some things that many people find helpful.

1. Get away for a while. You’ve been looking at this thing for too long, and too closely. You don’t even know what you’re looking at anymore, do you? STEP AWAY FROM IT. You might want to take a few days, maybe even a week or two away from the book. I suggest picking an amount of time, though. Because some people step away and continue stepping away, and before you know it they are on the other side of the continent and running fast. Pick a date you’ll come back, and have things ready for yourself on that date. Nice clean desk. Nice mug. Nice fresh mindset.

2. Maybe send it out to some people to read. If you feel you have good readers, maybe see what people think. Be aware, though … a good reader is a wonderful thing, but sometimes hard to find. Some people will read your work and not want to offend you. Some people just give crappy notes. Pick people you think would be good at reading critically, people who can give you some solid feedback.

3. Or don’t. You don’t have to do step 2. A lot of people feel that first drafts are much too raw for comment.

4. Read it. Sit down and read it with your fresh eyes. The book may be different from what you remember.

5. Sketch out the plot. What happens? Graph it out. Make notes on what actual important thing happens in each chapter or section. Look at this as a whole.

6. Make your own notes. Give yourself a few major tasks to handle. First revisions are about BIG EDITS. You can do ANYTHING in a first revision. I usually blow my books up between the first and second draft and REBUILD it with the pieces.

7. Make a schedule for yourself. You got this draft done because you were following a structure. That’s how you do it the next time. Give yourself a reasonable, but not loverly loose, time perimeter. Decide how much you need to accomplish each week. Put your plan on your wall, or put it in your computer, or chisel it into a rock … just make it real and tangible.

8. Don’t be scared to GO BIG with the changes. Seriously. This is when you rip out HUGE SECTIONS like the HULK. That’s right. This is HULK EDIT! HULK SMASH DRAFT! MAKE NEW DRAFT!

HULK NO LIKE THIS CHAPTER. CHAPTER HAVE NO POINT. CHAPTER GO.

The important thing is to KEEP GOING. I always say this BECAUSE IT IS TRUE.

SMASH!

Auntie MJ

butonlyslightly asked you:

Should I worry about the title?

My true love butonlyslightly,

The word worry has two meanings. The first meaning is to think about something in an anxious way. The second is to work at something, to gnaw or pull or tug until it gives way. Auntie MJ suggests that the second meaning is more useful here than the first. You don’t need to worry about the title. There is no need to rock back and forth, clawing at your own hair. Titles come when they come, and titles can be changed.

My favorite title story is that of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald had a VERY HARD TIME figuring out what to call his book. He considered: Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Gatsby, The High-Bouncing Lover, On the Road to West Egg, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, Trimalchio, Trimalchio in West Egg, and Under the Red, White and Blue. He really wanted to go with Trimalchio in West Egg, but was advised that the reference was too obscure. Even after the book was in and more or less ready to go, he was still trying to change it to Gold-Hatted Gatsby or Under the Red, White, and Blue. He was never happy with The Great Gatsby. Generations of readers, however, have found it to be quite good. It’s iconic and clean. Most of his other titles are, frankly, kind of fussy. Some are hard to understand. Any, however, would have sufficed.

So you see, even FAMOUS WRITERS pull out their hair over this, but at the end of the day, the most important part of the book is the book. (Also, you’ll see from this story that titles OFTEN CHANGE or go through development stages, and they are often worked on in conjunction with an editor.)

You certainly don’t need a title to get the book done. It was that way for me with my newest book, The Name of the Star. I didn’t have a title for it for 13 months. It was just called “the book.” But I did have a notebook I kept running in my spare time, where I would jot down possible titles. I came up with about 150 or so that didn’t seem quite right. Then one day, boom. I knew the title. I called and said, “HERE IS THE TITLE.” And everyone said, “YAY!”

But with the second book? I knew. Boom. It just came out during the first draft. I knew it should be “The Madness Underneath.” One took over a year. One just fell out, as snow falls from the sky … soft and gentle.

Don’t sit around holding up your book because of the title. Keep a piece of paper with some ideas. For NaNoWriMo, it seems perfectly acceptable to have no title at all by the end of the month! Give it a working title, or a ridiculous title, if that helps you get on with it. (I usually have a ridiculous fake title when I am just starting something. It gives me something AMUSING to look at when I start working.)

With love,

Auntie MJ

heidiloveslife asked you:

What do you do when you feel like you don’t have enough life experience to write the story that you want to?

You have asked QUITE a question. This is one of the biggies that you can wrestle with for a long time, and answer in a lot of different ways. That you are asking it at all feels RIGHT to me. It’s a sign of some good thinking about your writing.

To answer this, I have to go to my standby answer to a completely different question. Many teens ask: how can I get my book published RIGHT NOW? And I advise not worrying about that, because writing a book and publishing one are two very different things. One is a wonderful act you can do at any time. The second is a business matter. And you have to get good at the first part before you can do the second. And getting good generally requires time and practice and … you said it … experience.

Because, yes, it is helpful to have gone through lots of life experiences and had time to reflect on them. It’s good to know what that feels like, and what that feels like five years later. It’s helpful to see how things tend to work in patterns. It’s helpful to see how patterns and habits can be broken.

So, say you write a book at 15. I can GUARANTEE to you that that book is going to look DIFFERENT to you at 20 and 25 and 30. Because you are going to have gone through a lot of experiences by then.

THAT BEING SAID … we have to start. We have to write something in order to write! And there are a few things I can advise. First, dig deep into your personal database of feelings. Use your imagination. Try to think of how something might feel. Try to make any possible correlation you can. Writing involves putting ourselves into other people’s places and mindsets … and they are not all places a person can really go. We can’t really go to Hogwarts, or to the disco on Mars, or 4000 years into the past. We have to IMAGINE it. We have to be EMPATHETIC.

It helps to have details. If you are writing something that takes places in the past or somewhere else in the world, you need to do a lot of research. If you are creating the world, you need to figure out the rules. The more specific things you have to play with in your imagination, the more you can feel out the space.

Reading LOTS OF BOOKS helps with all of this. Stories help you see things from many different perspectives. This is one of the many reasons writers are always saying you have to read if you want to write.

But for NaNoWriMo, give yourself a chance to give it a shot. Don’t worry about getting it exactly right on the first try. See how it turns out. You never know until you do it.

Yours always,

Auntie MJ

erraticartist asked you:

Dear Aunty MJ, I’m having the OPPOSITE problem that you blogged about a few days ago, in which you talked about finding books that have similar themes to the Novel that is being written right now. I find that I am stealing elements from novels that I really enjoyed in the past, even from books I read years ago. I red recently that ‘all art is stolen’. Is this behavior ok, or should I rip those elements out when it comes time to revise? -Little Thief

This is a bit tricky. While it is true that stories are built on the backs of other stories, as bricks are laid upon other bricks so to build a tower to the moon*, actually taking elements from other stories is something you want to avoid. But it all depends on what you mean by STEALING ELEMENTS.

The question here is one of degree. If you are telling me that you want to have a sword fight in your story because you like stories with sword fights, that’s fine! If you are telling me that you want to have a sword fight in a castle, because you read (or saw) The Princess Bride and thought it was awesome, well, that’s okay. Castles and sword fights … that’s general. And castles and sword fights go together like cheese on top of more cheese! But if you are telling me that you want to have a sword fight that is IN EVERY WAY like the sword fight between Inigo Montoya and Humperdink, and then your character says, “Hello. My name is [INSERT THE NAME OF YOUR CHARACTER HERE]. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

… well, that’s problematic.

The idea that all art involves stealing is a very nuanced one. Many books have the same BIG IDEAS or themes. Sometimes people yell “Plagiarism!” when the book is not plagiarized at all. It’s impossible for me to say if what you are doing is okay or if it is plagiarism. I haven’t seen your work. What I can say is that even though art borrows from other art, the new thing that is created should be just that-a new thing. If you think what you’ve made is EXACTLY like another book, then you have a problem. I can also tell you that you should not be using THE SAME WORDS. Or even combinations of words that are EXTREMELY LIKE the combinations from the original sources. That is plagiarism, pure and simple. There should be nothing in your story that is immediately recognizable as being exactly or almost exactly like the passage of another book. There are a number of excellent resources on plagiarism. Check them out. But if you feel the passages are too close … perhaps have a think. Take this as a chance to CHANGE them. To think up NEW TWISTS.

Unless I have gotten this all wrong, and by STEALING ELEMENTS you mean that you have been stealing quantities of actual elements like hydrogen, carbon, molybdenum, magnesium, xenon, sodium, ununquadium, iron, oregano, flannel, and vaseline … Auntie MJ is not the person to ask. She assumes these things are punishable by ten years in an prison, or possibly death, but you should consult the internet on such matters.

Elementally,

Auntie MJ

* Auntie MJ has always assumed this is what bricks are for.

boywithbread asked you:

Glorious boywithbread!

Auntie MJ has been around for a while. She is not saying she has heard it all, but she has heard a lot-certainly more than she has wanted to hear in some cases. One thing that gets up Auntie MJ’s nose is this idea that people can tell you that one specific way of writing is better than another. I don’t mean to call your writing professor a silly ninnymuggins, but … oh. Perhaps I do.

There is nothing wrong with writing in the present tense. It is a perfectly valid use of the English language. People who tell you there is something wrong with it are expressing a personal preference as if it is a Law of Writing. Some people don’t like it.Some people don’t like a lot of things. Some people don’t like: romances, war stories, vampires, lack of vampires, italics, thick books, thin books, books with a lot of adjectives, books that don’t have many adjectives, books that explode upon opening …

All matters of taste. And taste does not a rule make!

Haters gonna hate, but Auntie MJ urges you to pay no heed. They have no ground to stand on. Here is a helpful article from Grammar Girl on the subject of present tense in writing, with a list of some famous novels written in this style.

If you continue to have problems, you send your professor to me. Auntie MJ will sort it out. She can be very persuasive.

Auntie MJ