NaNoWriMO

[Clueless]

Hey, I know Planewalker is planning to do a November Novel Writing Month contest, is anyone else going to be participating in NaNoWriMo this year? Has anyone here ever participated in NaNoWriMo before? (Got anything you can show us if you have? Hm?)

 

[Scribe Ineti]

I'm participating. This will be my first year. Good luck!

 

[takyris]

If you don't mind a word of advice... here are my thoughts on NaNoWriMo:

1) It can be a wonderful social group experience. It can also turn into a strange quagmire of wannabes who spend an entire month updating their blogs with detailed information about how hard it is to write and how hard they're trying and how crazy it all is, gablah gablah. So in that spirit, if you want to be a professional writer, act like a professional writer. Write, feel free to share how much you've written if it's a good motivator, but don't get caught up in the drama. The people who get caught up in the drama end up not doing as well as the people who, well, write.

2) Outline the heck out of the story beforehand -- or better yet, steal the plot of an existing novel. My character-focused novels take a lot longer to write than my plot-focused novels. If you have your novel outlined in enough detail that you know the goals, fears, and secrets of each major character, as well as a general outline of what each chapter needs to accomplish to advance your plot, it's going to be a lot better. Outlining in detail also reduces your chances of having to go back and fix something before continuing.

3) Purely a matter of taste, but I've found it more effective to set myself the goal of completing a certain scene or number of scenes per day, rather than a certain number of words. If you go by number of words, as I used to do, you end up completing the scenes you've thought about and then having 800 words left to go to meet your quota, so you have minor characters meet up and chit-chat for a couple pages -- which is fun character stuff at the time, but tends to slow down your overall novel later on.

4) If you can come up with a specific time each day or night to write, excellent. It can also help to have specific music that you set up as a trigger, or even a specific scent. My wife is Native American, and I got into a nice habit of smelling these little bundles of cedar that she hangs around the house to get me into the writing mindset.

5) Anything that breaks your train of thought is probably bad. It can be a lot of fun to spend a half-hour Googling around to figure out a good Welsh holiday to have your characters experience (St. Crispin's Day, St. Crispin's Day -- where are the leeks?), but that's a half-hour of your set-aside-for-writing time that doesn't have any writing in it. Research beforehand on the really important stuff, and on the other stuff, put in a blank or placeholder, so that you can search for it later, when NaNoWriMo is over and you have time to do research. If you put all your stuff in fields like ***WELSH HOLIDAY?*** or something, you'll be able to find it again easily. And this way, you keep writing.

6) Figure out beforehand whether your goal is to simply participate, to finish your novel, to prove to yourself that you're a writer, or whatever. Then, when you do get involved in the inevitable social garbage, you'll at least have a notion of what your goals are. If the goal is to participate and complete your novel, then it doesn't matter that the novel you completed isn't very good -- you've proven to yourself that you can complete a novel, and that's what you wanted -- that's your confidence booster. And now you can go fix it. If the goal is to complete the novel, then maybe you need to take a day or two off, maybe it doesn't get finished in one month... but you complete YOUR goal. Which is the only important thing.

Anyway, hope it helps. Good luck!

 

[Clueless]

I've never done it before myself - though I've written off and on for - well, WAY too long. My english teacher in 6th grade had a creative writing experiment for half the year - and I've been doing it since. Unfortunately lately I've not made the time to make myself sit down and Write - so this'll be a nice challenge.

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

Meh. I did it (successfully) last year, but I don't really feel like I need to do it again. And this year I should be spending my time on other things anyway.

That said, I'll add a few pieces of advice to takyris's collection of good ideas (by the way, ABSOLUTELY make an outline, it makes it so much easier):

• If you're trying to meet the 30-day deadline, always remember: Quantity first, quality later. And very possibly "quality NEVER." Just write, and don't even think about editing it. Treat it like a writing exercise, which is all a challenge like this is really meant to be: it's kind of interesting to see where you go when you're just puking the words up onto the page.
  
  
• It's worth repeating: don't be afraid to write utter crap and just leave it sitting there on the page. Most of the game is getting to the point where you can consistently sit down and write, without breaking concentration or giving up or abandoning writing to do something more fun, and it's a lot harder to get to that point if you keep deleting stuff and asking questions like "Is this any good?" Hell, if you're going to write something good, go write it already and don't waste your time or your good writing on NaNoWriMo. This is about developing some kind of writing discipline, and maybe doing a little experimentation...not about making a publishable work.
  
  
• To back up takyris's first point, on the social group experience: absolutely avoid the group drama at all costs. Go ahead and go to one meeting, just to see who's there, and if you don't click with 'em or don't need other participants around to keep yourself motivated, then don't worry about ever going back. (Personally, I always left NaNoWriMo meetings feeling cranky and irritable, like I'd just thrown away an hour or more of my life. Whether that says something about me or says something about the other people at those meetings, I don't know. Probably it's all about me, though. )

--
i also found that the smarmy nanowrimo newsletters pissed me off and de-motivated me
ryan