National Novel Writing Month
For those who don't know: National Novel Writing Month is a yearly challenge in which participants write at least 50,000 words of a story in November.
Anyone else doing it this year? The forums just came back up, so I'm excited. Last year was the first year I succeeded and properly enjoyed myself, and I'm hoping to succeed again.
Don't know what I'm writing about yet, exactly. I have a setting, and it's science fiction themed, but I don't really have a plot or characters.
Anyone else doing it this year? The forums just came back up, so I'm excited. Last year was the first year I succeeded and properly enjoyed myself, and I'm hoping to succeed again.
Don't know what I'm writing about yet, exactly. I have a setting, and it's science fiction themed, but I don't really have a plot or characters.
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But I really need to think about this. And with thinking I'm not talking about the subject. I'm thinking about time management.
EDIT: Screw this, this is a once in a year chance. I'm a god damn author!
Also, I absolutely have no idea what I'm going to write, and quite frankly, I only want to know on day one.
Some people have written a million words in November, but I don't know how they managed that.
You know, the only thing that I'm not sure about is whether I should write in English or Dutch.
I'm definitely planning out some characters and a general plot. I tried coming up with it as I went along, and it... didn't work.
And then there's this massive crossover story with all characters I've created, since most of them are in the same universe anyway.
1st person is my best style, and it will no doubt be humour.
I've made one good 3rd person story, and that needs to be edited because I made a part that makes you just say "Why?", The reason, because the guy was bored
Huh? Why?
Before I learnt what NaNoWriMo actually meant I looked at it and thought "ahhh, more weird stuff, i'll save that for last
Somewhat on subject though, it's my ambition someday to write a sitcom. Thusly becoming a shallow husk of a man when nobody finds it funny
Somehow, at first I thought it was an abbreviation for "Nah, no Wiimote.", but this does sound interesting. I like to write sometimes, might give this a try.
I think it's really good for people who want to finish something. Write, write, don't worry about what you write, and at the end of the month, go back and fix it all. A lot of people start writing and never finish anything, and finishing your first piece is a pretty important step. Nanowrimo doesn't force you to finish, but it forces you to keep writing forward instead of being stuck fixing the same thing over and over again.
This being said I've never taken part in it and I probably won't. Good luck to everyone who does, though.
Sure, in the end it's all about quality, but that's not the point. Quality comes when you have quantity. After you have some considerable amount of pages, then you could possibly work on improving the quality. And even if you never look back at your project again, it's always nice to know you actually finished something.
A lot of people think about it, weigh every word, but in the end don't really write at all. I've just come back from a convention where I met authors, and guess what, they all write. They don't wait for inspiration. Often it comes after you've started writing. Sometimes it doesn't come, but you write anyways. If it's going to be your job, set your schedule and work every day, and do it. It's an important step, and that's what going to make the difference between a hobby and a career - even if you need another job to support yourself.
When you read or hear writers talk, that's one shocking thing. I remember one author who explained he had set 8 hours a day, every day (no weekend) to writing. One day a week he wrote a full short story. Had to finish it that day, write it all from start to finish.
And that was when he had a full-time job.
His first novel, when he finished it, was ten times the size it was when he published it. He said the mistake most writers make at first is writing too much. And when I see all of my friends' first novels, well it's true that they tend to be a thousand or two thousand pages long.
But once he finished it, he could work on removing the "non-essential" parts. Streamlining it. Being more concise. Once everything was in there, he could work on making it understood in another way, implying rather than saying, etc.
You don't get things perfect from the first draft. How many artists start with the inking? Or even the colouring, before putting lines on the paper? People sometimes want their first draft to be great, but the thing is, you're likely to need 5 or 6 drafts, especially at first.
Of course, you don't want to fall into the "start over every time" problem either. But you have more luck succeeding by writing, then fixing, than by trying to write it right from the start. Just think of all the things that might change in your story by the time you finish it. They'll require you to add or remove stuff in earlier chapters, if the earlier chapters are already "perfect", how do you add to or remove from them?
Anyways, different people will work differently, there isn't one method that works for everyone, but for people who can never finish anything, Nanowrimo's a good way to try and work on that. If you show me a finished work that's awesome, and you tell me "I wrote it right from the first try, and I wrote it backwards, from the last word to the first one" I'm not going to tell you you did it wrong, because obviously that worked for you. But if you tell me "I want to write a book starting with the last word and working my way to the first one, and get it right from the first try", I'm going to look at you weird.
Can't argue with results, but when there are no results, maybe it's time to question the method.
I think I'll do it again this year, but not with the goal of writing a full draft of a novel. I'll stick to the word count and attempt to write 50,000+ words in November, but will give myself permission to skip around in the story (which is almost always how I write, not from beginning to end as I did during NaNoWriMo last year) and not freak out if/when Thanksgiving comes and goes and I still don't know how it's going to end. Unlike last year, I'd like to end up with some writing I don't hate and never want to touch again...
That's great to hear! All of the stories I've managed to finish, I wrote in a non-linear way. Unlike you though, I have the whole story in mind before I start writing. Then it's just a matter of writing whichever scene I feel like at the time. Since I know what happens before and after, it's not a problem. I usually have one sentence descriptions of the scenes in between and I just write them as they come to me.
I tried writing in a linear way to put it online one chapter at a time, but I'm having a lot of trouble with that. I think I'll yield, write the future scenes that are coming to me (often it makes it much easier to write stuff that happens earlier on), and that will just create some kind of buffer I guess.
I'd like to get back into short stories, too. I haven't written them for a while, every time I talk about an idea I had, I'm told it's "a shame" to "waste it" on a short story, because the idea is novel material... But as a result I'm not writing these ideas at all so whatever, I think I'll do it. I can always expend them into novels later if I want. And I like writing short stories much better I have to say.
I've worked out a basic plot and setting so far, and am nearly done naming/figuring out all the main characters. I want to get a little more organized before November comes around, though.
I was sick this week so I got off to a kind of rocky start. Was at around 4100 words as of this morning. I've set a goal to get caught up today -- I'm at 6865 now, so I only need about 3100 to get back to where I'm supposed to be. That's doable, no?
I do have a general idea of where this story is heading, but something I learned writing my first (completed) novel is that the story doesn't always end up where you think it will, and trying to force it to end up there is a huge waste of time. I more or less rewrote my entire novel in the ~2 years after I thought it was done, and while a lot of it stayed basically the same, there were some big changes I wouldn't have anticipated during the 5 years I was initially working on it. So this time around I'm trying not to obsess too much about not knowing how certain pieces fit together -- and I'm especially not going to obsess on getting early chapters "perfect" before moving on to later stuff -- because I have no doubt that they'll be completely reworked when all's said and done.
(I had the first chapter, which was written outside of NaNoWriMo, critiqued last week by my writing group and they gave me a lot of good suggestions for rewrites that I'm simply tabling for now, to come back to later. When I think about how much time I wasted rewriting and rewriting early chapters that later on ended up getting tossed in the trash, it makes my brain hurt...)
Anyway... gotta get back to catching up on my word count.
ps This post is 300+ words. Multiply it by ten and I'd be all caught up!
Oh, and I meant to respond to this:
You're wasting the idea if you don't explore it, in whatever format. I'm like this too -- I avoid writing because I get too worried that I'm on the wrong track. All you end up with by doing that is no writing at all. I'm also good at writing short stories that people think should be novels, and maybe someday they will be. The novel I actually finished started out as a short story that I wrote in college in 1998; I started working on the novel in 2002 and finished it in 2009 -- more than ten years after I jotted down the original idea. Had I never written that short story, would the novel have been written at all...?
In other words, I suck too.
You can write several stories. Finish that one and start another one. There is no rule saying everything you write need to be one story, as far as I know.
That's an interesting idea. I'll see how it goes. Really, I'll be glad to have created one story. I'm not a writer, but it's fun to let the imagination run wild once in a while!
I'm up to 9175 words, and plan to knock out the last 800 or so before bed so I'll be all caught up for tomorrow. Feeling pretty satisfied!
I love to write stories and here is my excuse to finally write and not really care about how good it looks, but mainly focus on getting all my ideas out.
Anyone else joining this year?
It depends on my situation, but I'll certainly try and give it a go. I really do need to get back into my writing - I've pretty much dropped it, which is a shame, as I enjoy it. I've a fair bit on my plate at the moment, but if it's cleared up, then I'll be taking part.
Time to put this back into action.
Fast forward a year, I have four solid chapters (100 pages -- almost 30k words) plus a ton of notes/ideas and an outline for the rest of the novel. It's taken me a year to really nail down the beginning and understand what I'm writing about. (And I also know I've been lazy, I could have done more.) So I'm going to try it again, writing daily and following the outline, and see how much I can get out. If I end up with 50,000 (or, hey, even 30,000) words of "raw" material that takes me farther into the book, it'll be a huge achievement.
Anyway, yeah. Rah rah and all that. My username is fov if anyone wants to be NaNoWriMo friends.
Never really finished writing a story, but I might attempt one. Though, I'm not much of a novel-reader (Hitchhiker's Guide, Discworld and Lemony Snicket's ASoUE, that's it) so I don't know much about telling a story through nothing but words.
I'm great with concepts, I'm horrible at fleshing things out.