Tag: NaNoWriMo

Thank you to bestselling author Delilah Devlin, for graciously offering Rachel and me a guest post today.  I wrote about NaNoWriMo (of course!) and give some details about what all the madness entails.  Stop by today, and comment please!  (That way, it will look like I have friends – grin!)

Join me today at the Writer\’s Retreat Blog, where I answer the question of whether or not to NaNo!

NaNoWriMo officially begins today!  Have you signed up?  If so, I\’m a.catherine.noon on the NaNoSite, so please come friend me.

What is NaNo, you ask?  It\’s that craziness that is November!  Every year in November, National Novel Writing Month encourages thousands of people to write, and many of them complete the 50,000 goal – and more! – and come away with completed novel drafts.  It\’s great fun!

Check it out, and the NaNoWriMo site!

I finished my novel! It\’s my first, full-length original novel. I\’m so excited I could spit!

Neither cold, nor stroke, nor homework foul could keep me from my novel!

I\’d love to wax poetic about how amazing it is to write a novel, but… MY IS TIRED!

~faints~

Yes, well, so I make up words. Sue me.

But, today, I wanted to highlight Chris Baty, from NaNoWriMo. He sent an amazing Week Two pep talk, in which several things jumped out at me. It was so good, and I had such a hard time picking which parts to share, that I figured heck with it, I\’d post the whole thing here.

Dear Author,

Hey there! It\’s Chris Baty again, and hoo, boy, have I been watching some television. Do you know this show Battlestar Galactica? I\’ve just started in on the first season, and I am shocked by how much stuff the show\’s writers borrowed from NaNoWriMo.

For instance, Battlestar Galactica centers on a group of humans stranded in space after their worlds have been destroyed by their enemies. NaNoWriMo takes place in the space of November. In Battlestar Galactica, people are hunted by shape-shifting robots who sometimes wear red dresses. In NaNoWriMo, participants sometimes hunt for the, uh, red address bar, where…um.

Shoot. Okay, so the similarities break down a little bit at the granular level. But there is one irrefutable nod to NaNoWriMo in the show that many veteran NaNo participants likely noticed right away. The crew on BG use mysterious technology to \”jump\” from one galaxy to the next, folding time and space to cross vast distances in the blink of an eye.

This was obviously inspired by NaNoWriMo\’s two famous wormholes, which fling writers forward (in a good way) when they hit 25,000 and 35,000 words. At these magical tipping points, normal rules of NaNoWriMo physics no longer apply. Forward writerly motion becomes easier, fitful stories take off, and word-counts begin accelerating towards warp speeds.

Our mission this week is to heave ourselves up to the precipice of the 25,000-word wormhole. From where I am now, that feels woefully far away. In reading through the forums, I see I\’m not alone. Our non-noveling lives have turned hectic, we\’re facing tough decisions about what to do with our characters, and we\’re grumpy from lack of sleep. I am also—for the third year running—facing the very real possibility that my protagonists might literally bore me to death.

To help get us through Week Two and on to the exciting worlds beyond, I have a few tips I\’d like to share.

1) Write every day. Even if you just knock out 75 words before collapsing into bed, those 75 words will keep you connected you to your story in essential ways, and make diving back into your book much easier.

2) For now, stop thinking about 50K. Just sprint thousands. Visualize each writing session as a tall staircase made up of 1000 steps. You are part ninja, part monkey, and part stairmaster cyborg. You were born to fly up those steps. Bash out 250 words, and you\’ve made it halfway to 500. Keep going for another ten minutes, and you\’re past 500 and within striking distance of 750. Once you hit 750, you could sneeze out enough words to get to the top! After each thousand, be sure to take a quick break and celebrate. Then fire up that monkey spirit and go run another thousand.

3) Remember that your book is important. I didn\’t say this in the Week One pep talk because we\’d only just met and there\’s really only so much cornball sentiment from a random guy on the internet that anyone should have to tolerate in one month. But here\’s the truth: You have a book in you that only you can write. Your story matters. Your voice matters. The world will be richer for you seeing this crazy creative escapade through to 50,000 words.

This may be hard to believe given the craptastic state that many of our manuscripts are in. But there are great, unexpected things ahead for you in Weeks Three and Four. And there is someone out there who has been waiting their whole life to read the book you\’re writing now.

So don\’t slow down. Don\’t give up. We\’ll be at the first tipping point soon!

Chris

So, I’ve been writing.

A lot.

No, really. A LOT. For some reason, I decided NOT to discontinue my MBA work, OR the other two novellas I’m writing while doing NaNoWriMo. So my daily word count is really about triple the NaNo count. But I’ve learned something in the process, and it’s about the tools.

Yeah, the tools. What tools, you ask? Well, read on, MacDuff, an’ I’ll learn yeh!

I sat down this morning to do my morning pages and realized I didn’t do them yesterday. (I am, on occasion, inclined to ignore my own advice.) (No, YOU don’t get to ignore my own advice, I’m just special. So there. ~sticks out tongue~)

Well, actually, let me back up. I sat down with my AlphaSmart to write some more on my current WIP. No, the other one. In the process, I kept finding myself noting things that I usually put in my morning pages. Like stuff about my day, the bus, the weird lady in the corner talking to a cell phone without a cell phone, stuff it’s really better NOT to write about pre-coffee but that’s what the rules say – morning pages are first thing in the morning, every day, and twice on Sunday.

So, as I’m trying to type, I realized something.

Julia Cameron is right, again.

Darn it all, I really get tired of that.

So I’ll say it again, for myself if no one else is listening: morning pages should be done every day, particularly during periods of heavy creative production. We need the rest they provide. And if you don’t believe me, just try sitting next to me on the bus one morning before I’ve had my coffee and talk on your nonexistent cell phone.

I might even invent a new word for you.

~typity~

This is actually kind of fun! I write and I write and then I get to post my word count! Zoom!

I’ve learned something about the writing process in the process, too. Yes, that’s process in the same sentence twice. ~shrug~ That’s what editing is for, right? Ah, grasshoppa, you just stumbled on something there…

See, I’ve found that the internal editor isn’t really my friend. I mean, sure, it helps me fix things once I’ve written them, but it does a piss-poor job of actually WRITING itself. In fact, you know what? The editor doesn’t write a lick of sense! It doesn’t even write a lick of nonsense! (Maybe if it did, it would be more prolific…) But as I work to accumulate word count, I have to get around the urge to perfect as I write and just be willing to tell the story.

Which, I suppose, is like any writing.

But I’m continually amazed, and this is my fourth day at it, that I make my word count so fast. When I actually write, I write … well, I write a lot more than when I don’t write, that’s for sure!

So, friends, I hope my disconnected post-NaNo-daily-post babble makes some sense, because the important part is this:

Just write.

It’s a helluva lot harder to edit it, if ya ain’t written it first!

Take THAT, editor!

NaNoWriMo Word Counter Thingie
So, of course, I want to know how I’m doing, right? So, I set up the NaNoWriMo word count thingie on the NaNo site. But that’s not enough!

Must.have.spreadsheet.

(Hey. I work in Finance as a day job, what do you expect? Excel is, like, cool, man!)

So, I set up an excel sheet. Nothing enormous, just a few simple calcs. Targets, cumulative totals, that kind of thing.

~techgeekglee~

Date; Goal; Cumulative Goal; Actual Daily; Actual Cumulative; Notes.

MUST have Notes.

After all, I am, like, a writer.

But that’s not enough!

No. In today’s day and age, must have widgets!

Ergo, I went to a really interestingly named site, too: language is a virus. Which, when you think about it, really is true.

But, I digress.

I got mahseff a widget! Yes, folks, a brand-spanking-new widget. ~preens~

Go see for yourself! Look right, young man, look right! It’s even – gasp – updated for today’s word count!

Which accounts for the paucity of sense but overabundance of exuberance of this post.

Time now, for a NAP.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

It’s November. (WHERE did the time go??) November is the traditional time of turkey and family gatherings, which for some of us can be a mixed blessing. We like the food just fine, it’s the…

Nevermind. My family might read this.

ANYWAY. What else is important about November? NaNoWriMo, of course!

Say wha?

NaNoWriMo is what we writers (insert lofty, snooty voice here) like to call, National Novel Writing Month. Brought to us by the same people who invent greeting cards, probably. But it’s a month in which participants attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel, start to finish. Poof.

I’ve known about this for a while now, but never really thought to participate. Something about this year is different. Bad water, maybe? But I threw my hat in the ring and today begins the writing.

Which of course, being me, means that I have some thoughts about the writing. (Put the rotten tomato down. Now. There’s a good boy.) One could simply get out of bed, skip the shower, (ew!), and go right to the keyboard to write and not stop until word number fifty thousand and one.

OR, conversely, we might think of a saner way to do this.

Now, I know there are people out there who do the ‘double dog dare,’ which is a hundred thousand words in a month.

I’m not one of them.

I want to have my sanity at the end of this, and I have a huge family celebration smack in the end week. So, how do I plan this?

Let’s break it down. 50,000 words divided by 30 is 1,667. So, if we write 1,667 words a day, we’ll hit our target. For me, writing in paragraphs spaced similarly to this blog, where paragraphs are single and there’s a line break in between each one, that’s about four pages. Just four pages a day. I can do that. Some days, I might have more time, so I could bank some extra pages to see me through that aforementioned family week.

But what else? We might be tempted to abandon all hope, ye who enter… Uh, wrong quote. We might be tempted to abandon the tools we know keep us stable and balanced. This is a supremely BAD idea. Why? Because, dear reader, we want to arrive at December sane and balanced! I am a devotee of the Artist’s Way, as those of you who follow this blog know. So will I skip my morning pages and avoid artist dates in the interest of having ‘more time to write?’

Absolutely not!

In fact, Julia Cameron advises us to take TWO artist dates in a time of heavy creative output.

And trust me. Fifty thousand words is heavy creative output.

So I plan to write my four pages a day, shower and brush my fangs – and floss! – and do my morning pages, even if it’s kicking and screaming. And, I’ll admit, today was tough – I wanted to skip them and dive right into my WIP, but I was a good little writer and did them.

And here’s the thing. I don’t feel crazy.

(Of course, isn’t that what all crazy people say? O.o…)