Join Us on October 17 for the Craft of Composing Panel Discussion

On October 17, the SNL Month of Writing will host "The Craft of Composing: A Panel of Writers Discuss the Writing Process." Panelists this year include Rochelle George Wooding of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance; SNL faculty member and author Ann Stanford; award-winning author and SNL faculty member Molly Dumbleton; and SNL alum and Writing Showcase winner Megan Stemm-Wade. Click here for more information about our panelists. 

And remember, the Month of Writing Challenge begins on October 1! Click here for more information and to register.  

Details: 
October 17, 2013
6:00 - 7:30PM
Loop Campus
14 E. Jackson
Room 1451

I Am Not Going to Get Up Today: How I wrote 50,627 words in 30 days during the 2012 SNL Month of Writing

Steffanie Triller Fry

I did not get out of bed. That’s my big secret. That’s how I reached my 50,000 word goal for SNL’s first annual Month of Writing last October. I did not get out of bed until I had reached my word count goal for the day.

            Bed was a familiar place for me last October. I was in my first trimester of a first pregnancy. I wrote with a granola bar and a water bottle beside me. Some mornings, despite the granola bar and water bottle, morning sickness hit anyway. My brain is never fully present to the world until I’m up and moving. When I’ve just woken, I’m still in a foggy, dreamlike trance. The covers are warm and the room is cool: my mind tends to wander in these moments. In these minutes, I do some of my most effective thinking of the day. I plan my day, work out problems, write drafts of emails on the insides of my eyelids. This is my time of uninterrupted creative expression. Last October, I used it to my advantage. Each morning, I set a goal of 2,000 words. I often wrote more: if I was on a roll and time permitted, I let myself keep going. I wrote quickly. I didn’t think too much about what I was writing. I was working on a novel – the first I’d ever attempted – about four children who travel back in time to a key moment in their parents’ lives. I did not plan much of the story beforehand; rather, I let it unfold in these early morning hours. Often, in this warm haze of pre-dawn, I found that my fingers worked without my direction. I write best when I don’t look at the keys. (After all, we all have our unwashed socks that we wear on game day to help us to hit the home run, right?) My characters interacted in ways I never thought possible. They found new relationships; they found words of dialogue. They found reasons for traveling in time. Words mounted; the story grew. It changed direction a few times, after all, it was only a first draft. At some point, I realized that I had written over 40,000 words and I needed to start bringing the story to a close. I had done it: I had written my 50,000 words, with a few hundred extra for good measure.

            Besides not getting out of bed, a few other tricks worked for me:

            Most days I woke at the same time. I subtracted three hours from the time I needed to leave, and set my alarm. I kept the computer next to my bed so that I would not have to break the spell of sleep. Somehow, if I did not leave the bed, I could convince myself that I wasn’t really awake yet. Somehow, I thought I had mastered writing in my dreams, still asleep, still blissfully unaware of the dark outside the window. The first week was hard, but once it became expected, became routine, it got easier.

            I didn’t talk to anyone. When I talked to someone else it became harder to hear the characters talk to each other.

            When I got stuck, I read what I had written the day before, or I went back to the beginning and started reading. Particularly on the mornings after I had taken a day or two break, it was helpful to ground myself in the story and the characters.

            I outlined every day. I wrote an informal list of places that I wanted to go in the story. The next morning, I could pick up with whichever scene most moved me. Because I always woke with a goal and direction for moving the story forward, I didn’t have to do this difficult work of structuring the story early in the morning, when my mind wasn’t working this way anyway.

            I gave myself a reward. I’ve come to love facials. I’ve only ever had two. But I told myself that if I completed my novel, I could get another facial. My favorite part is the neck and shoulder rub.

            I ran the event. Because I’m the SNL faculty member in charge of the month of writing, I would have been pretty embarrassed if I hadn’t met my own goal.  

            What are your unwashed socks? What tricks help you complete your writing tasks? This October, I invite SNL students, faculty, alums, and staff to challenge themselves to meet their own writing goals, even if it means refusing to get out of bed in the morning.

Month of Writing Challenge Website Is Live!

Registration is open for the SNL Month of Writing 2013 Writing Challenge! 

Please visit our new Digication site for more information about signing up, the Challenge itself, upcoming events, and more. 

Coming in October: SNL's Month of Writing Marathon

Get ready for SNL's annual Month of Writing Marathon! This October, accept the challenge to write 50,000 words in one month, working with students, alumni, staff, and fellow faculty toward a collective goal of 1,500,000 words. More information will soon be available on the Writing Guide; also feel free to contact SNLWriting@depaul.edu for more information on how to participate. 

Also this October, instructor Steffanie Triller Fry is offering a course in conjunction with the Marathon: AI 196 - WriteNow: SNL Writing Marathon. This is a late start (10/3) course that students can take for one competence (A2X, A5, FX). 

Digication Training & Resources for Faculty

Just in time for kicking off Autumn Quarter, FITS announced several upcoming Digication training workshops for instructors:

LPC: Friday, August 30 at 10:00 am in SAC 240

Loop: Wednesday, September 4 at 2:00 pm in Lewis 1006

LPC: Thursday, September 5 at 2:00 pm in SAC 240

Loop: Monday, September 9 at 10:00 am in Lewis 1006 

Click here to register for any of these sessions. 

And as you begin to introduce Digication in your courses, remember that several departments have developed excellent resources for both you and your students: 

• Click here to visit SNL's own Digication resource site.  
• The Writing Center's site provides a step-by-step guide for creating portfolios, adding text and multimedia, and designing portfolios.
• You can also request in-class workshops facilitated by a team of tutors from the Writing Center. 

An Imaginative Reading List for Writers

When BrainPickings.org’s founder Maria Popova was asked by the New York Public Library to curate a selection of books for its bookstore, she decided to create four reading lists: books on NYC, books on pets and animals, books for young readers, and, last but not least, a collection of wisdom on writing. But rather than simply gather books for a tabletop display, Popova partnered with artist Kelli Anderson to construct a papercraft diorama showcasing each title in painstaking detail. The resulting installation is both beautiful and a fantastic resource for anyone looking to be re-inspired before Autumn Quarter begins.

Click here to see Popova’s write-ups of each book and the full list of titles, which includes works by Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Henry Miller, and Susan Sontag, as well as several edited collections of essays.

A New Use for Google Books

The English language is a living thing: words become obsolete, others become popular, and new ones are created. We’re all aware of this process, but have you ever thought to yourself, “I don’t remember using or hearing that word very often, but now it seems to be everywhere overnight.”

Has the popularity of the word truly skyrocketed? Or were you just not paying attention before?

With Google’s Ngram Viewer, you might be able to figure it out. This nifty application—which really should come with a procrastination warning—uses texts from Google Books to graph word usage over time. You can trace a single word or phrase’s written frequency over time (hipsters got a lot of attention in the 1960s and were all but ignored in the 1980s) or you can compare several words (you’re unlikely to see either these days, but tell your friends that verily was always more popular than forsooth).

Lexicographers, linguists, grammarians, and people who simply like a good dictionary were all atwitter when the venerable Oxford English Dictionary announced its decision to add a new definition of tweet: “to  submit a post to the microblogging service known as Twitter.” (Ironically, microblog hasn't yet made the cut.) The Ngram data set only goes back to 2008, so we can’t see the jump that has almost certainly happened in the last five years and which prompted the OED to break its own rule about only adding a word after ten years of documented popular usage. Still, it was interesting to find out that tweet also experienced a heyday around 1810 but that apparently no one had much to say about birds in the 1850s.

Google Book Ngram Viewer