Writing Advice from Junot Diaz

So Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, wrote about the difficulties of writing on oprah.com, and I thought it was fitting to read his thoughts, since I'm in the horrible third week of NaNo and I'm really really behind in my story. Here are two parts of his article that I really liked.


"It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked. My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool. But they were cool, showed a lot of promise. Would also have been fine if I could have just jumped to something else. But I couldn't. All the other novels I tried sucked worse than the stalled one, and even more disturbing, I seemed to have lost the ability to write short stories. It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn't find an exit. Like I'd been chained to the sinking ship of those 75 pages and there was no key and no patching the hole in the hull. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, but nothing I produced was worth a damn."


"Because, in truth, I didn't become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn't until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am. "

More Snicket! More NaNo!

So I'm taking a break from writing to pass on a great piece of news from the New York Times. Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) is writing more books!

Lemony Snicket, the notorious pseudonym of Daniel Handler and the author of the bestselling “Series of Unfortunate Events” sequence, has agreed to sell the North American rights to publish a new four-part series to Little, Brown &Co., moving from HarperCollins. The first volume in the new series is scheduled to be published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in 2012. In a press release, Megan Tingley, publisher of Little, Brown’s Children’s division, said the new books would be a series of “highly inventive and entertaining works that will enthrall Lemony Snicket’s legions of fans.”Mr. Handler has also signed a deal with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers to publish his first young adult novel. The book, as yet untitled, will be illustrated by Maira Kalman, who composes an occasional visual blog for the New York Times Op-Ed page. That novel will be published in 2011.As part of the deal, Mr. Handler’s longtime editor, Susan Rich, will join Little, Brown as an editor-at-large in the Young Readers group.The “Series of Unfortunate Events” books, which have sold 60 million copies worldwide and apparently ended in 2006, were published in North America by HarperCollins Children’s Books.

I love the "apparently" added. It did not "apparently" end. It did. The last book was called "The End," in fact. Lol.

As for NaNo, I'm at 12,094 words right now, which is horribly behind what I should be at, roughly 18,000, but I'm aiming for 15k by the end of the night. I've been writing each day, but the problem is I'm not writing enough to keep up sadly. But the story is moving along now, so it should get easier, I hope.

Until later!