For NaNo newbies: Chris Baty is the founder of National Novel Writing Month. Grant Faulkner is executive director.

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I'm ariestess on NaNo.

So I read 4 pep talks, 3 by authors I know and like, and 1 by an author whose name just sounded neat to me.

First I read the 11-05-17 Pep Talk from Deen Koontz. It dealt with worthwhile criticism vs. naysaying, which is actually something I needed to read with regard to my own writing. I've chosen to use the same general rule of thumb with praise/kudos, as well, even though it wasn't included in the pep talk.

Then I read the 10-28-14 Pep Talk from Kami Garcia. Okay, so this one dealt with doubt and reasons you come up with not to write ...and ways to combat them. It was something that helped me with a few of my own issues that I allow doubt to creep in to sabotage my writing from time to time.

Then I read the 11-01-10 Pep Talk from Mercedes Lackey. That this pep talk is about writing fanfiction is both wonderful and hilarious to me. I love Mercedes Lackey anyway, but this just made my day, ngl...

And lastly, I read the 11-01-07 Pep Talk from Neil Gaiman. Wow! This was one I really needed to see. The whole conversation about how we ALL get to that point of wanting to chuck the whole works into the trash, even the pros. It felt good to be seen, as it were, and understood.

I really liked all 4 of these pep talks. They gave me info that I needed to help me move forward with my writing. The Lackey pep talk just made me chuckle, though I am going to check out her new series/podcast, or new at that time.

Moved the post by date out a week since I am perpetually behind this month. It may be denial that yet another year is slipping by..

11/01/2009 Pep Talk from Jasper Fforde: I expected this pep talk to be funny and weird like the books I have read of Fforde's. However, this was all about just putting words on paper. Practice makes perfect. I often need the reminder that a first draft (or a first project) won't and shouldn't be perfect. If it's a terrible thing, it doesn't mean you can't do it. It just means you need more practice. "The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more."

11/06/2013 Pep Talk from Patrick Rothfuss: This is another pep talk that basically talks about sitting your butt down and putting down words. But he encourages you to do something else. He encourages you to break the rules when it suits. Have a nifty idea for a different story in the middle? Go write that and then come back. His "rule breaking" says 1 - you don't have to start from scratch, 2 - you can revise sometimes, and 3 - follow your enthusiasm. This sort of fits with what I am doing this year - editing my novels so that I can finally call them done and readable. He says the point is to learn something and improve your craft.

11/03/2008 Pep Talk from Piers Anthony: This pep talk veered a little away from the "sit down and write" of the previous two. But it does include the "practice makes it better" message. Piers is always a joy to read. This pep talk wasn't any different. He starts off with calling the reader a fool for attempting NaNoWriMo but ends up saying that he writes about that much on his own, so it's not an unreachable goal. He breathes a humorous life into writing and creating new ideas. I took away the message of "you can do it, no worries" from this pep talk.

NaNo Name: Ctice.

I selected pep talks by writers who are new to me. I’ve either not read anything by them or haven’t heard of them before. I chose one from 2021, one from 2020 and one from 2019. As it turned out they were all by female writers, so I scrolled looking for an interesting face and landed on one from 2013.

From author Tracy Deonn (Oct. 24, 2021), I liked this description of what writing a novel is like: “part alchemy, part organization, and part emotional rollercoaster.” I do keep lists, but not nearly as extensive as the ones she describes using. I’ve discovered through the years that if my outlining is granular like that, I feel like I’ve already told the story and I’m ready to move on to the next idea to explore. A notion of hers that was unique to me, is starting difficult or slow days with 250 words of fan fiction. I was writing fanfic before it was a popular thing. (In one of the great Internet side trips into “research” land, I just paused to look up the origin of fan fiction. TechTimes says: “The actual term ‘fanfiction’ was coined in 1939 by the sci-fi community as a derogatory term to differentiate between crude, amateur sci-fi fiction and professional fiction, or ‘pro fiction.’") As I was saying, as a teen, I wrote “episodes” of all my favorite TV shows. That work got me in the habit of writing. And seeing Deonn’s suggestion to do 250 words of fanfic – rather than morning pages or forcing a WIP – really sound like a good idea. I’ve been very slow in writing the last few years, so this “just for me” writing is something to explore.

For a 2020 pep talk to read, I landed on Charlie Jane Anders (Nov. 2, 2020) because I love her pink hair. Before even reading the pep talk I was uplifted by that bright color. As someone who has never had the courage? Guts? Moxie? – to boldly color my hair, I was drawn to her. I have experimented with weaves/hair extensions and actually liked one, a sort of amber color --- but not enough to dye my own hair that color!

Anders wrote: “You may find yourself facing ogres and tigers and other things with “grr” in their name, but you are fierce and mighty…!” That’s SO empowering, and not just because I like tigers.

“For now, your task is to create a first draft.”

That should be my mantra. As a matter of fact, I’m going to print out the poster/meme someone created under it.

I roamed through her website and have listed her 2016 Nebula Award-winning novel, “All the Birds in the Sky,” as one to get – hopefully from Audible.

And as my 2019 pep talk, I clicked on Maurene Goo (Nov. 11, 2019). After doing the basic Google search for her 5Ws, my takeaway was this line of hers, “The only thing you can do to finish that book is to write it.” Ah, so simple, so true, so very difficult to accomplish at times. Then she wrote this – “You’ve got to reach into some deep part of yourself buried under all the reasons why you can’t, and remember why you wanted to do this.” -- and I exhaled.

That’s what I’ve been doing this NaNo: I went out and bought a spiral-bound notebook to write in longhand. I wrote most of my early stories and manuscripts longhand, and came to the conclusion that I needed to return to the well source. Reading that line from Goo was confirmation that a part of me knew how to approach and tackle the problem by, as she said, reaching “into some deep part of yourself buried under all the reasons why you can’t.”

The photo of Patrick Rothfuss (Nov. 6, 2013) on the pep talk page put me in mind of the kind of guy you hang out in the hotel lobby bar with until 3 a.m. after a writers’ conference talking about everything imaginable, laughing it up and having an overall great time. (Yeah, that example is specific for a reason.-smile. If you guys haven’t done that before, I highly encourage it. Just go join a conversation with a group of people.)

In reading his pep talk (after Googling his name to see what he wrote), my first impression was confirmed with this line, “Consider yourself cheered.” I cracked up at that. His piece is one that gives people who need a permission slip to be a NaNo Rebel. I’ve been a rebel many, many, many times. So my biggest takeaway from his pep talk was the most important advice ever: sit down and write. Overall, I had an eclectic mix of pep talks from writers of LGBTQ, fantasy, science fiction and YA genres and sub-genres. I enjoyed each one, so much so, that I wrote this 861-word piece commentary on them. And every single word is counting as today’s NaNo words! And in the purest spirit of NaNo, I’m not going to read back through this or do any editing to it. It will stand as is. Thanks for reading.

What's truly remarkable here: I got the coding right as I was writing in a Word file before the copy/paste here. I see I did miss a couple of new paragraph spacing, but you'll get the gist.

I'm Artisticinva on the NaNo site.