A friend of mine who’s a published writer gave me this trick for writing a first draft. NaNoWriMo aside, this is the only trick that’s helped me make progress on a first draft.

Curious to try it for yourself? This is what you do:

1. Get a kitchen timer. You’ll need the kind you can set right in front of you. New ones go for about $5 at the grocery store.
2. Find 15 minutes. Turn your phone off, close your browser, lock your kids in the closet—do whatever it takes to get yourself ready to sit down for 15 consecutive minutes.
3. Open your draft file. Whether you’re using Google Docs or a plain ol’ text file, open it up and put your cursor at the end.
4. Set the timer to 15 minutes. It’s possible to write one page in 15 minutes. But only if you keep moving forward. This is where your new little buddy the timer will help.
5. Press the start button and WRITE. Write one page, that’s all you have to do. No re-reading what you’ve just written. No racking your brain for just the right word. No going back and rewriting what’s already there. Push yourself past those temptations and just WRITE.

Do these steps for enough days in a row, and you’ll have yourself a completed first draft.

You’re skeptical, I can tell. So let me tell you what will happen as the timer ticks away:

• 14:50: You wasted 10 seconds staring at the blank page. Time to start your first sentence.
• 13:45: Holy crap, where did that minute go? You realize you got stuck on one measly phrase in your first sentence.
• 13:39: Ack! You have to write something, but what?
• 12:45: Whew, first sentence done, second sentence started.
• 10:32: Two new paragraphs magically appeared on your screen. Sweet!
• You finally finish your first page, but you realize the timer never went off. Stupid timer. Now you’ll have to return it to the store. You glance down at the dysfunctional machine and it says:
• 2:19: You finished a page with TWO WHOLE MINUTES LEFT! Go, go, GO, don’t look back!
• BEEP! You throw the timer across the room to shut it up and keep writing.

The worst that could happen is you won’t quite make one page. But only if you’re not following the rules. No re-reading, no rewriting, remember?

Every single time I’ve used this trick, I end up writing closer to 2 pages in 15 minutes, or I get on such a roll that I end up writing for longer than the original 15 minutes. I am not a terribly fast typist. My brain does not work faster than yours. It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with your new little buddy.

So don’t go sticking him in a dark drawer where he’ll have to fend for himself against spiders and sit helpless as his batteries die. Your buddy loves nothing more than to sit in front of you, gazing into your genius writerly eyes for 15 minutes at a time. Don’t deny him his little ducky heart’s desire.

Do you have any little tricks like this to help you finish your first draft?

Photo by tanakawho.

Last week, I started reading the cobbled-together monster that is my NaNoWriMo 2008 novel. Let me just say this: WOW. It reminds me of what my dog might create if I gave her some blank paper and her own excrement to spread around. Anne Lamott was not wrong, no sirree:

Now, practically even better news than that of short assign­ments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts…I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Still, it’s hard not to be completely demoralized by the stark contrast between my novel and the fabulous creation I’m currently reading, Broken Soup.

But the awesomeness that is Jenny Valentine gave me an idea. You know how in middle school, to learn proper grammar your English teacher made you diagram sentences until your eyes crossed? It sucked, and I am totally not condoning such heartless torture of defenseless kids. But I have to admit—and please don’t tell any teachers this—that it kind of, sort of, maybe helped me learn grammar.

Could I “diagram” a great novel to learn how to de-suckify my own novel? Kind of like taking apart a car engine to learn how it all works together?

Leave a comment to chime in with your thoughts on whether this is viable:

• Have any of you aspiring writers tried to diagram a novel before? And if so, how did it go?
• Or: If you haven’t ever tried such a thing, do you think it would be useful to your writing? How would you tackle it?

Photo by miconian.

Natasha of Maw Books Blog recently interviewed Ingrid Law, the author of Savvy. This quote struck a chord with me:

I decided to write the craziest sentence I could think of without judging it too much.

It’s such a simple idea, but the more I think about it, it’s frickin’ BRILLIANT.

Because when you sit down to write—after you’ve killed time on Facebook and used a toothpick to flick, flick, flick out the crumbs between the keys on your keyboard—what’s the biggest obstacle to getting words on the page? That pesky internal critic, right?

So if you start out by writing the craziest sentence you can think of, you’ve given yourself permission to let the craziness continue. You’ve set the crazy bar. That internal critic will still be there, of course, but that first sentence can be the shiny object you distract her with. Make it so crazy she’ll go on about it for days and days before she gets around to noticing what you’re writing after that.

Let’s try it. To start us off, here’s the first sentence of Savvy:

When my brother Fish turned thirteen, we moved to the deepest part of inland because of the hurricane and, of course, the fact that he’d caused it.

I’ll go first, but I know you can be crazier than this:

• I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment that I started believing my dog Sadie was Ronald Reagan reincarnated, but it’s too late for that.
• Lynn opened the library doors and snapped her eyes shut—with blue books next to red books next to green books and black books everywhere in between, she might as well turn around and go back home.
• If I ever find the kid at our school who started everyone making Top 3 Teachers I’d Totally Do lists, I’m going to punch him in the face.

Okay, now go crazy! And please share your craziness in comment form!

Photo by barefootinfla1.

I’m picky when it comes to book reviews. I usually have to sneak reading them in 10-minute stints while my 1-year-old daughter entertains herself by pulling everything out of a drawer and spreading it over every square inch of the kitchen floor. Since I have to glance back every minute or so to make sure she hasn’t unearthed a plastic bag or an airplane bottle of liquor, some types of reviews get read by me and others not so much.

I know I’m not alone in this. A lot of us aren’t able to dutifully read every word of every blog we subscribe to. I try to keep this in mind when writing book reviews myself, and in the spirit of D.U.O.A.Y.W.H.T.D.U.Y., I’ve developed a list of guidelines I use to try to meet the needs of the wide range of reading needs.

1. Rate it—I want a quick way to figure out whether you loved, liked, or hated the book. With limited reading time, I’m not going to read about books you didn’t love unless it’s something I’ve already read myself or something I was considering reading already. If your reviews don’t have a rating or an overall verdict no longer than one line, I’ll leave them unread in my RSS reader until I have more time to read. Which is typically once every 3 months when all the chores are done and the bills are paid and the baby is off on a weekend errand with her dad.

   Example: 1morechapter.com

2. Summarize it—I’m just not into certain types of books, so I like to be able to tell that right off the bat before investing my time in a review. Also, if you’re a YA-nnabe like me, it’s good practice to try to sum up an entire book in a sentence or two, as you will have to do that for your own work when writing query letters and talking to editors at conferences.

   Example: Fyrefly’s Book Blog

3. Keep it short—I struggle with this one, especially for the books at either end of the spectrum. I either want to gush on and on, or defend my assertion that a book wasn’t that good so people won’t call me a big ol’ meanie. I try to stick to 5 short paragraphs or less, not counting quotes. And if that’s not possible, I try to keep the paragraphs super short and break them up by using lists, links, and bold or italic formatting to highlight key phrases.

   Example: propernoun.net

But every reader is different. What do you look for in a good book review? What guidelines do you have for yourself when writing a book review?

Photo by tm_lv.

• The Bluestocking Society: Writing a Book Review
• Book Escape: How to write a book review??
• Books on the Brain: To Rate, or Not to Rate
• Critical Mass: Reviewing 101: John Updike’s rules
• The Dark Phantom Review: The Slippery Art of Book Reviewing… to hit the stores this June!
• Problogger: Write a ‘Review’ Post

In November, I wrote a novel for NaNoWriMo. Yay me.

But since then, I haven’t touched the poor little bugger.

My problem is I don’t know where to start. Options I’ve considered include:

• Read it straight through and write any edits that occur to me in 0.001 seconds but don’t get bogged down in the editing. Just mark what I like and don’t like, then fix it later.
• Take one chapter at a time and pore over each paragraph in great detail. Firmly in the bogging down camp.
• Outline the structure of the story and see where that takes me.

I’ve read the NaNoWriMo advice, but I still feel unsure of where to start. Help me?

What works for you? Or, what does your fave author blog have to say on the topic?

Photo by wrestlingentropy.