In case you just crawled out of a cave, after spending a reasonable amount of time writing your novel, here’s a news update:

It’s National Novel Writing Month. Okay, not really. Only on the Internet. And only if you are a writer. Oh, and only if you buy into the whole “Thirty Days and Nights of Literary Abandon” concept. Me? Not so sure. Oh, it’s a great way to jump start the old muse.

Wake up, you fool. Get to work.



The problem is, shaking our muse awake and barking commands only serves to startle him or her into leaping from slumber and running headlong into that pesky, graffiti-scarred wall the East Germans used to call “Writer’s Bloc”. In fact, it’s been my experience that putting a collar on the muse and leading her to water gets you two things:

1) A pissed off muse.

and

2) A snoutful of fear when she throws you on your back and waterboards you.

Stress has never been, in my experience, a prime ingredient for creativity. And forcing words—if that’s what the writer ends up having to do—is a pretty poor way to create lasting, quality prose.

Just sayin’.

I get the whole “motivation” idea. Like I said, though, I think the NaNoWriMo concept makes for a better wake up call than an actual event. However, each year I am wont to wonder about this whole National Novel Writing Month phenom. Were this to literally become a national “month”, would we bookend it with National Sing The Star-Spangled Banner In Front Of A Sports Audience Month and, perhaps, National Drive A Stock Car In An Actual Race Month?

Seriously. Why is it that everyone believes they have the next great novel in them? I mean, sure, we all probably have a story or two to tell, at least in our own minds—but what gives with a quarter of a million people bellying up to the old writers’ bar and ordering themselves “whatever Hemingway was having”?

I’ve asked the question before. I’ll undoubtedly ask it again.

I’ve also mentioned before, I think, that I used to sing in a small town tour group. Even “soloed”. Mostly because I could carry a tune with a bucket—a BIG one. Thing is, I always realized the hard truth of the matter. I never—not once—signed up to try out for American Idol. (Sheesh. It would have been a slaughter. What minuscule talent I perhaps once had, riddled with bullets of criticism, reeling, dying, falling in the dust like Clyde lying in that fateful Texas road.)

My talent, if that’s what you’d call it, wouldn’t have stood a fighting chance.

When I was a pup, I also drew comic books. Again, I could draw better than, say, the most rudimentary creator of stick figure diagrams (and I don’t mean artists who make even stick figures look good). Again, I knew my limitations. (Well, perhaps at eleven or twelve years old I didn’t, but I think even then my blinders were fading appropriately.)

We should each have several (if not dozens) of these kinds of examples. When we’re young we want to be professional athletes, rock stars, Oscar-winning actors, and, yes, some of us want to be writers. NOTE: I didn’t want to be a writer. In fact, even when I started reading a lot, and would have loved nothing more than to be a writer, I still didn’t yet dream it. That took actually discovering a bit of talent.

And may I please define “talent” here? The talent of the author is not simply grammatical excellence (i.e. “A’s” on term papers), which is where I happen to believe a lot of people become confused with their own propensity to create the next lauded work of fiction. You know of whom I speak. You read their blog posts, their newspaper articles, and their technical papers and think, “wow, these folks can really put the pen to paper.” Unfortunately, that is also what they’ve been told all their life. Because in a way it’s entirely true. Grammatically speaking. Fiction, however, is not about grammar only—any more than singing is solely about sheet music.

Just because you can compose a great song does not mean you can sing it. And because one can master the technicalities of the language, keeping prepositions from dangling off the ends of one’s sentences, does not mean one can sing.

And make no mistake. Authors are supposed to sing. Beautifully.

Yes, even writers in the Horror, Fantasy, Thrillers, and Graphic Novel genres. You can sing a wickedly authentic, haunting, and even terrifying ballad. You can sign about death, mayhem, carnage, horror, and loss.

But you are supposed to sing.

Not talk. Not drone. Not present.

Too much of the writing I sample these days has no lyrical quality. There is no song. I read a guest blog post today by talented author Dean Mayes that really got me to thinking about this reality. What is missing from so many of the books out there today (particularly those uploaded to Amazon free of charge) is the song. And by that I mean the voice of the singer who can deliver the story. The new digital literary market (and I use the term “literary” loosely) seems to be in the midst of defining an authorship guild that requires nothing but a correctly-formatted file and a semi-reliable network connection for membership (many times not even those).

And, somewhat accordingly, since 1999 we have NaNoWriMo. Last year over 200,000 people participated in the challenge, writing over 2.8 billion words. That’s like a 9-word tweet to every United States citizen. The real question that comes to mind is: would any of them be worth reading?

Sure. Some. A smattering would likely be downright excellent. And therein lies the rub:

Finding the good ones. They’re out there. Indeed, many of them will come from factions of the 200,000.

A good number will be written by indies like Dean Mayes. I’m currently reading his debut novel, The Hambledown Dream. I don’t want to give anything away, but I can tell you Dean gets it. He writes from his soul. Using both the music of his heart and the soothing, lyrical music of the real world in which he lives. He hears the words, not as staccato speech, but as music. And he writes them that way.

Don’t take my word for it. His writing is proof enough, and we are all better for his having written.

In whatever month he chose to do so.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The blank page is dead…long live the blank page.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As I mentioned, Dean Mayes has written an extraordinary story in The Hambledown Dream. The writing is both gritty and lyrical; poetic and raw. This is the first book I have recommended in one of my blogs. It dovetailed so wonderfully with the core idea of this particular post: writers with chops, delivering prose that truly takes us away from our own present and transports us into a dream world. Dean Mayes accomplishes this with his writing, and I wanted to share with my readers this Indie author, of whom I am now a huge fan.

Synopsis:

Australian Denny Banister had it all; a successful career, a passion for the guitar, and Sonya – the love of his life. Tragically, Denny is struck down with inoperable cancer.

Andy DeVries has almost nothing; alienated from his family, moving through a dangerous Chicago underworld dealing in drugs, battling addiction; all while keeping a wavering hold on the only thing that matters to him: a place at a prestigious conservatory for classical guitar in Chicago.

As Andy recovers from a near fatal overdose, he is plagued by dreams – memories of a love he has never felt, and a life he’s never lived. Driven by the need for redemption and by the love for a woman he’s never met, he begins a quest to find her, knowing her only by the memories of a stranger and the dreams of a place called Hambledown…