NaNoWriMo 2014

[Corporea]

I've just been using my old student copy of word.  I also downloaded calibre to play with formats so I can send my stuff to my friends' kindles, etc.

 

But, I wanted to share my nifty trick!  I got over my writer's block in a sneaky way.  I have a hard time looking at the words I type.  They make me nervous.  So I shrink the window down and hide it until only the top bar is visible at the bottom of the screen.  Then I can type away and not have to look!  Hah hah!  Take that, brain!  Plus, it keeps me from stopping and trying to edit every little spelling error I notice which throws off my rhythm.  I get more done when I don't think too hard about what I've written.  Although when I edit later sometimes I wonder what I was actually trying to type...

[NomadZeke]

I might join in this year, jump on the wagon...although with my luck it'd be tripping over the side of the wagon, tumbling past a couple people, and then gracefully face-planting on the floor of said wagon, just to get up like "I meant to do that."

[Silvervane]

I plan every year, and never manage more than 1k-2k written.    I plan to join again.  This time with the goal of writing daily, even if I don't finish I figure I'll have a story started and well on my way to a habit.

[Aard_Rinn]

Hm... Am I gonna do a double or a triple this year?

 

Probably shoot for a double, since I'll be busy this month. 3k/day isn't too bad...

 

I've got a short story anthology I'm working on - maybe I'll do one 1600 word story/day, and then I'll do 50k of some kind of fanfic? Transformers, probably...

[Corporea]

Squee!  2123 words today!  Finally, I can write them down!  Good luck everyone!  (We need a bouncy smiley face...)

[Last Knight]

Scrivener's working out really well for me! I'm 8k to the good - and haven't actually written anything today, day 3, due to the chaos and havoc involved in coming into port again. I should get on that (but the internet's on...)

 

Hope everyone else is finding the beginning of the month as refreshing and enjoyable as I am!

 

If you haven't already added me as a writing buddy, you should feel free to do so - I'm Last Knight on there as well.

[TGP]

I down loaded that Q10 software. Tested it a little. Kinda liked it.

 

How much dinero do the owners want for Calibre or Scrivener?

[Last Knight]

Calibre is free - it's a conversion program, rather than a word processor. I use it to convert e-books for my Kindle and tablet (swapping back and forth from .lit to .mobi or .epub). http://calibre-ebook.com/download

 

Scrivener is $40, but you can get 20% off as a NaNoWriMo participant (use code NANOWRIMO at check-out), or 50% off if you "win" NaNo this year. I'm probably going to shell out the $20 when NaNo is over, since I'm fairly confident in achieving 50k and I'm finding the software really useful this year.

 

Best of all, you can download a free trial of Scrivener, good for 30 days of actual use - give it a whirl and see if it works for you. http://www.literatureandlatte.com/trial.php

[Last Knight]

So, Chris Baty (founder of NaNoWriMo) wrote a puff piece for the month over on HuffPo that about sums up my attitude, and I think is a pretty handy response to the various nay-sayers out there.

 

Is it possible to craft a great novel in just 30 days?

 

Nope.

 

But you can do something better: You can craft a reasonably unhorrible first draft of a novel in 30 days.

 

Here's why that trumps greatness every time:

 

1) When you embrace the fact that your first draft is going to be flawed, you free yourself from the impossibly high expectations that can make creative projects so miserable. Aiming for completion rather than perfection takes the pressure off, and the ensuing feelings of joy and discovery come through in your prose. As Chuck Wendig has pointed out, the less you worry about the outcome of a writing project, the better it often turns out.

 

This also helps explain Rainbow Rowell's discovery that, when you write for quantity instead of quality, you can end up getting both.

 

2) Using a warts-and-all, don't-look-back approach gives you a huge amount of writerly momentum. Novels get derailed by so many things: Work, family, self-doubt, a new season of Game of Thrones, a small turtle crossing the road, etc. Which is why having lots of creative momentum is essential to getting your book finished. The nice thing about bashing out a beautifully flawed first draft is that you are flying, and the hurdles that would normally have knocked you for a loop barely register as speed bumps. Sure, the sentences aren't pretty, but you're focusing on the more important task of getting a beginning, middle, and end down on paper. Which brings me to...

 

3) Tolerating inconsistent, awkward, derivative, and generally un-great prose in your first draft will save you months of work in the long run. We often don't discover what (or who) our books are really about until we've written through to the end of them. The first order of business in a second draft is often cutting or changing large swaths of the manuscript so everything lines up with the new story, tone, or cast of characters. If you try to make every paragraph beautiful right out of the gate, you'll spend countless hours perfecting prose that will only need to be rewritten or cut. A reasonably unhorrible first draft lets you hold off on the fine-tuning and put those priceless revision hours in the stuff readers are more likely to see.

 

To me, that's pretty great.

 

Happy writing, everyone!

[TGP]

The little I have so far certainly corresponds to the No Plot? No Problem... notion.

[Reaperbryan]

 

 

I kind of hate NaNo because it teaches people some bad habits, but I still think about doing it every year. Maybe this year I will. Maybe maybe maybe. My Pathfinder game is a key obstacle, also, but I think we're operating infrequently enough it'll probably fly.

Bad habits? Please explain?

 

 

Oh, uhm. I don't want to ruffle feathers, especially here in the thread dedicated to people's having fun with NaNo (I've blown up an Internet writing forum or two that way), but I find problematic the way it values dumping words on the page over putting necessary words on the page and how it turns writing into a once-a-year event. I'm a big believer in developing a healthy and productive approach to writing that leads to long-term success for the writer. NaNo, in my experience with it, too often seems to run the other direction, unfortunately. It reinforces a boom-or-bust approach. I guess the tl;dr version might be simply: Rome wasn't built in a day.

 

Having said all that, there are exceptions of various sorts. And I really do consider participating every year, despite my issues with it, and am considering it again this year.

 

the point of it is to get something you can call finished. Even if it's not good.  Because the hardest part for some people is finishing.  Finish one.  Then go back in January and edit it. Or destroy it and start over on one that's good.  But be able to say you finished a book. Then you've beaten that mental block that keeps you form finishing a book - because you finished one. It might have been terrible, but it's done.

 

Quality comes with time and talent - but so many people never finish because they're intimidated, and they always believe every word has to be liquid gold from the outset. Nonsense. That's what editing is for. NaNo says finish the book now. Get over that fear. Then let it rest. Let your brain rest. Then edit the book. See what's salvageable and what needs to be destroyed with fire, and do both.  

 

Then do it again. And again. Until it's all good. But you can't edit your manuscript until you've finished one, so Finish One.

[Corporea]

must...not...edit... argh!  ...but my spelling!    And why, oh why, does the new kitten insist on somehow num-locking my keyboard when i'm not looking?  I really didn't mean to type all of those numbers... but what did I mean to type... sigh... kitten timeout time!

I really liked the old Neil Gaiman pep talk, btw.

[Last Knight]

 

 

 

I kind of hate NaNo because it teaches people some bad habits, but I still think about doing it every year. Maybe this year I will. Maybe maybe maybe. My Pathfinder game is a key obstacle, also, but I think we're operating infrequently enough it'll probably fly.

Bad habits? Please explain?

 

 

Oh, uhm. I don't want to ruffle feathers, especially here in the thread dedicated to people's having fun with NaNo (I've blown up an Internet writing forum or two that way), but I find problematic the way it values dumping words on the page over putting necessary words on the page and how it turns writing into a once-a-year event. I'm a big believer in developing a healthy and productive approach to writing that leads to long-term success for the writer. NaNo, in my experience with it, too often seems to run the other direction, unfortunately. It reinforces a boom-or-bust approach. I guess the tl;dr version might be simply: Rome wasn't built in a day.

 

Having said all that, there are exceptions of various sorts. And I really do consider participating every year, despite my issues with it, and am considering it again this year.

 

the point of it is to get something you can call finished. Even if it's not good.  Because the hardest part for some people is finishing.  Finish one.  Then go back in January and edit it. Or destroy it and start over on one that's good.  But be able to say you finished a book. Then you've beaten that mental block that keeps you form finishing a book - because you finished one. It might have been terrible, but it's done.

 

Quality comes with time and talent - but so many people never finish because they're intimidated, and they always believe every word has to be liquid gold from the outset. Nonsense. That's what editing is for. NaNo says finish the book now. Get over that fear. Then let it rest. Let your brain rest. Then edit the book. See what's salvageable and what needs to be destroyed with fire, and do both.  

 

Then do it again. And again. Until it's all good. But you can't edit your manuscript until you've finished one, so Finish One.

 

Chuck Wendig has a great quote (from his book "Confessions of a Freelance Pen-Monkey," although it may well have originated in his blog Terrible Minds) along the lines of, "Writing is when you make the words. Editing is when you make the words not redacted." It hit home pretty hard with me.

[TGP]

must...not...edit... argh!  ...but my spelling!    And why, oh why, does the new kitten insist on somehow num-locking my keyboard when i'm not looking?  I really didn't mean to type all of those numbers... but what did I mean to type... sigh... kitten timeout time!

I really liked the old Neil Gaiman pep talk, btw.

Your kitten is asking (sort of) nicely for a paper bags puzzle house to play in.

[buglips*the*goblin]

I can name* at least one (semi)professional writer who declines to do NaNoWriMo on the grounds that 50,000 words in 30 days would be too easy. Producing a rough draft isn't particularly difficult; making that rough draft smooth, is.

 

*But won't.

 

I can name him - he's me.  Last Knight is sort of right about why I don't do Nano, but really it's because my volume of production is that or higher as a rule, so it's sort of like cheating for me. 

 

I produce a lot of material.  Most of it is garbage.  Anything that's totally irredeemable goes in the Cabinet of Doom, anything with potential gets selected for the next round.  Anything that survives that goes onto the next, so forth.  This process will lead the survivors through minimum four drafts, for which I have very pretty color-coded folders. 

 

This, of course, raises the question of why, if I produce so much, nothing has yet escaped to be browsed and bought with my name on it yet.  This is a complicated question to answer, but the simplest one is that my (fiction) work isn't ready yet.  It's probably at a stage where it can do okay, maybe even well, but I'd like to put some more boot camp time in.  Training saves lives.  Because if one does break out and do well, I better have the skills to do it again. 

 

Writers write, good writers rewrite.  That's an ancient axiom.  I'm still finding and fixing my bad habits.  Despite my daily drills, my grammar can still skew atrocious.  I sometimes get confused about what a gerund is (to my everlasting embarassment).  Being voluminous is the least of all scribbling vices, if a vice at all.  Nano is something most people do for fun, or a challenge, or whatever.  Not a lot of the end results will get more work and the necessary full-draft rewrites to make them good.  But that's not really the point of the exercise.  Every writer produces great heaping gobs of crap, it's an occupational hazard.  What separates the paid pros out is that they work on their sifting and fixing skills after they push out that first stinky wordturd.  Glimpses into the rough drafts of storied authors are rare, we don't usually get to see them before the red pen bloodletting, but most of them are very terrible.  They just grow beyond that through the real work. 

 

I mean, every idea I write down I think is good when I do it.  I know most aren't.  Some aren't bad, some are genuinely awful and might turn hapless readers to stone.  But there remains only one way to find out which is which - write it down.  Eventually one of mine will survive bootcamp, the levels of promotion, and not make my genie girlfriend employ creative circumlocutions trying to find a polite way to tell me I've done a bad thing on the rug.  And when it does, it should be pretty decent and fulfill my contract with whatever generous soul decides to give me a break and try it out.  That end result is all of why I've tried to make my system of evolution as brutal as possible.  But all of that is after the first messy draft.  That one is my funtime, my play in the mud time.  Full of dangling participles, dead ends, unresolved conflicts, bad dialogue, and important side characters completely forgotten about five chapters in.  Some of them might as well have been scribbled in crayon.

 

But it's just raw ore I mined.  So after that we then stick it into the furnace to burn away impurities and see what can be forged from it.  Some of the best concepts turn out to be terrible books, and some of the worst concepts turn out to be great ones.  Every single person here, depending on their level of engagement and effort, has the potential to pop out something good.  Maybe even something astonishing.  Getting there isn't easy, but it shouldn't be.  Being difficult is what makes it worth doing, if a person wants to pursue it that far.  And if one of you breaks out and does this before I get around to it, I solemnly swear to be equal parts celebration and envy.  But I'll buy it and add it to my shelf of books from friends who broke out.  I'm halfway to being a midwife for bestsellers.  Mostly by talking people off the ledge partway through when, usually rather imbibed, they decide they have no chance, their work is terrible, they're terrible people, and their stuff is bad and they should feel bad because they've wasted their life and are a detestable fraud.  I sometimes have to do this even when they're several titles in and their advances have crossed seven figures.  Insecurity never goes away, that's why the freedom of the first draft is essential for sanity.  Go off the chain.  Go all the way off.  There's no telling what you might find if you do, and timidity has sunk more careers than going full-bore with your hair on fire has.  There's always another draft if you need it.  As many as you want, no bag limit. 

 

In the end, all beginnings have a beginning:  write it.  If that's for Nano, great.  If not, also great.  But always enjoy your first trip into the messy mud, because that's where all the real magic is.  That's where you get to tell a story to yourself.  If you can't enjoy it, nobody else will.  If you feel like going further after that, of diving headlong into the agony and the ecstasy... well, just try not to call me four in the morning when you're drunk and need some cheerleading.  Keep it to a decent hour. 

Edited November 6, 2014 by buglips*the*goblin