National Novel Writing Month: NaNoWrimo

[Tanukitsune]

I'm hopeful this is the right place to talk about this, since it doesn't seem appropriate for the other subforums.

 

Has anybody here actually given NaNoWriMo a shot? I don't think I'll "win", but I do think it will a great experience, so... does anybody have NaNoWriMo plans or advice?

 

I listen to the "I Should Writing" Podcast because I'm a fan of the creator, so I know a little about writing, as in it doesn't matter if it sucks, don't stop writing and edit later, which seems to sum up the advice I've already read and heard. 

 

And now I'm feeling incredibly awkward because this post feels too meager for someone who is supposed to write 50.000 words next month. Verbosity is not my forte, but I guess that's more the reason to give it a shot.

[shammack]

I did it once, when I was in college and had spare time. I wrote 50,000 words, but most of them were pure garbage just to inflate the word count. I didn't get much out of it. I feel like it's a pretty bad way to try to write something, but if it's really the only way you can motivate yourself to get it done, and you just want the satisfaction of being able to say you wrote something that technically qualifies as a novel regardless of quality, I guess it could be worthwhile?

[Bjorn]

I've never tried it, November has been a notoriously busy month for me for most of the last 15 years, so I never feel like I'd be able to give it the attention it would deserve.

 

That said, I met a young woman a couple of weeks ago who was wearing a NaNoWriMo t-shirt and I asked her if she had done it.  She giddily launched into telling me all about it.  It was really awesome, her enthusiasm and joy at having set a goal and achieved it just radiated out from her as she was talking.  It had clearly given her a giant confidence boost and was an all around great experience for her.  So it helps at least a few people. 

[Roderick]

I might join in purely to finish my next novel in time for the launch window next year =_____+=====----__OOOO;;;;

 

Never actually done it though. I once started in the spirit of the thing, which is just going with a flying start and little preparation, but I quickly hit a dead end when I ran out of ideas and things to talk about. In my experience, you need a hundred ideas before you can even start to figure out where to go. As a writing excercise it might be great though, but the format is better suited to short stories, which are more easily frontloaded in full into your brain.

[Tanukitsune]

I'm probably the least prepared around here, I'm probably going to run out of ideas in a week, but apparently their sight has a forum to help your creative juices flowing. Oddly enough, just by announcing it on Twitter I got some moral support from random writers on Twitter, which makes me even more curious about the site in general.

[TangoCharlie]

I did it one year. It was great! Wrote my 50,000+ words. The results aren't spectacular – it ended up being a sort of improvised sort of thing that I'm sure could technically be described as a "story" under someone's definition – but that's okay. The end product's not the point. The value's in the experience.

 

I learned that you can't wait for motivation or inspiration, and that the best way to get through "writer's block" is to just keep writing. It feels really good to have hammered out your daily 1,500 words when you really, really didn't feel like doing it. At least as good as those times when everything falls into place and 1,500 words appear in a blink.

 

Recently I was at a talk that someone was giving about "improving your writing." One of the other attendees kept asking, "how do you make time to write?" I might have been sympathetic to his repeated questioning before doing NaNoWriMo, but now the question seems ludicrous. Of course, you just make time for it. I guess that was one of the takeaways, too.

 

So do it! It's basically exercise for writing. Keyboard-based marathon training. It's not a guaranteed good time, but you'll probably feel good results if you put in the work.

[Boris Stoke]

I've done this eleven years in a row and completed it ten times.  This is the first year in a long while that I will not be participating.  It's gotten to the point where I have a billion first draft novels and I should probably just spend time rewriting one.  So that's what I'm planning to do this month.

 

Hopefully.

 

I hate rewriting.

 

I highly recommend the nanowrimo experience for those interested.  It's very rewarding and as Tango mentioned, it's a great writing exercise.  You'll write a lot of crap but you'll find some diamonds in the rough too and you'll find cause to be impressed with yourself.

[Twig]

This is one of those things I always want to do but never will because I am an unmotivated disaster of a human being.

[sclpls]

Yeah I don't think I could ever do this while I work in the legal industry which is incredibly busy in November (attorneys have to make sure they are hitting their annual billable hour quotas!)

[Tanukitsune]

Frankly, I'm still pretty excited even though it's my first time and I'm likely to fail. 

[ExitDose]

I'm thinking of doing this. Sounds like a lot of fun.

[Mawd]

I've begun. But I'm off to an abysmal start as it also has been a busy month for me.

 

I've chosen to mine my life for fiction. I don't mean to get anything historically correct; my main goal is to get the 'feel' of what my life was like during University. It's not a fixed window of time though; I plan to let it jump back and forward.

When I'm done I might not use the basis of me as the main character, someone or something more interesting will probably crop up. I'm treating this all as a prototype that'll be vastly rewritten if successful. 

 

I've lately been a firm believer in "write what you know" so I figure if I start with the closest fidelity to my life I can export the frame of these experiences into actual works of fiction.

[Tanukitsune]

I've miraculously reached the 5000 word mark. I'm worried if my story will take 50.000 pages to write or not and I don't like the idea of extending the story for word counts' sake. It's too soon to say though.

[Roderick]

Moddus, another great thing about writing what you know is that you save approximately one hundred ninety million hours doing research, since you already know how all the corridors of your life smell.

[Nappi]

  On 11/3/2014 at 9:06 PM, Tanukitsune said:

I'm worried if my story will take 50.000 pages to write or not and I don't like the idea of extending the story for word counts' sake. It's too soon to say though.

 

Your goal is quite ambitious!

 

 

Good luck to all of you! I wish I had the skill, motivation and perseverance to write a novel.

[Tanukitsune]

I can't believe I've reached 16,000 words, I might actually make it! 

[Tanukitsune]

HUZZAH!

 

[Roderick]

Congrats!

[Tanukitsune]

Apart from editing it, I am completely clueless on what to do next. 

[TangoCharlie]

Congratulations! I hope you enjoyed it!

 

What to do next? Post it online? Tell everyone you wrote a novel? I dunno, write a new thing? THE WORLD IS YOUR 50,000-WORD OYSTER

[Mawd]

  On 11/27/2014 at 7:31 PM, Tanukitsune said:

Apart from editing it, I am completely clueless on what to do next. 

Re write it. Analyse the crap out of it; re write it some more.

[Nappi]

Congrats!