NaNoWriMo 2003

I'm going to spend this month, as I know you are also Tep, doing notes and getting a decent structure happening so I at least have something to work with/hang onto if I flounder at any point in November. I'm still wavering nervously over the topic I've picked, but at this late stage I don't want to start changing my mind again.

Looking forwards to it though. I feel like the literary equivalent of an impatient driver at the blocks, revvin' my engine.

Pray for me, everyone.

I ask this every single year, btw.

... what's the point of ever writing a novel?

A) Sign up for their website
B) Announce it to everyone
C) Write specifically Nov 1-Nov 30?

Basically I'm asking what people are meant to get out of rushing out a shitty novel and submitting it to a website where no one will read it or help you with it or anything, you just get an online sticker to put on your blog.

I'm not knocking anyone DOING it, I want to know why! Every year I get like this horrified confused reaction to the question!

It's a motivational thing for me. When you're as blocked as I am, you'll try anything. But to each his own, right?

ugh

You get a certain degree of moral support out of it; not people reading your novel, necessarily, and no, no one's going to help you with it per se, but they can't anyway. You get understanding -- you can blow everyone off and just write with much less complaint than at other times of the year, believe me.

Mostly you get a sense of accomplishment, and if you pay attention to what you're doing and don't just write aliens coming in to blow up the love triangle you don't know what to do with, for the sake of hitting 50K, you learn enough about novel-writing to figure out if it's something you really want to do again.

ugh

I hear you, Vic.

True enough, I suppose. Though I can never remember to enter the competition myself, it's always interesting to read what mates have spent so much time agonising over---then give them further validation when you're done.

Why do this? Its like why climb everest? Because its there. No one cares if I finish this or not or its even readable - except me. And that self-discipline is something I need a lot more of.

To me, writing a novel just always sounded like a neat thing to do. When I'm 80 I'll be able to say I wrote a novel at some point. I don't know. I love to read, but I'm getting really tired of a lot of the plot lines. I am interested in romantic comedies, but it's hard for me to find ones that seem geared towards me in particular. It's the same reason I started playing music. I needed something more for myself, something that spoke to me. So, basically, I hope to write a book I'd want to read.

I think the point of having it all in one month is to force yourself to get words out on paper. That's probably the hardest part. You can always go back and edit and do re-writes. It's getting that word count out there so that you can have something to work with that's difficult. I've tried writing stories a few times, but I usually ended up just staring at the computer screen for a long time and then getting bored. I hope I can actually push myself to reach some sort of closure this time.

Who knows, maybe some day I'll be sittin' at home, eating bon-bons, cat in lap, writing romance novels. And it will all start next month. Whoopee.

So how much of a plotline does everyone here have going? I had fun reading through some of the NaNoWriMo forums, but it's more fun discussing it with my fellow ILXors as I feel I sort of know some of you.

1666 words a day (if I remember right) is not as hard as it might sound. If you can write it, dialogue can make things go quicker.

I must say Tep, some of your "what I'm doing" tips on LJ have been a great help too.

I just need to lead up to this with some reasearch, as the core idea Ive come up with has some psychological and theoretical things I need to know more about.

Or maybe I could just talk shit. Who knows.

Writing 1500 words a day? Christ, that's easy. That's nothing. I could do that in the bath. When I was writing, I used to be able to bang out 10,000 words on a good day. Hah! So if I could get 5 days solid work, then I'd have a novel. Maybe I should do it. I'll think about it at the weekend and maybe sign up on Monday.

1) You don't need all THAT much planning. It's hard for me to gauge: mine was about Jesus. I pretty much knew the tentpoles[a], and I knew how it ended. Figure out the clock -- I should've put that entry into memories, but the clock of a story is the thing that has to happen in order for the story to end (and likewise, once it happens, the story is over except for wrapping up, and wrapping up should be quick without being rushed): the clock of Saint of Daybreak is Bishop figuring out what happened to him, and getting Nicky and Leah off his back. The clock of Die Hard is Bruce Willis defeating the terrorists (or more to the point, getting himself and his wife to safety).

Figure out what the clock is pretty soon into the story, if not ahead of time -- that way, any time you're stuck, just ask yourself, okay, I'm thirty miles from the clock right now, how do I move towards it?

[a] Tentpoles are probably obvious, but: don't think about plot as an inevitable progression, exactly -- yeah, there's the clock, but there are lots of ways of getting there, depending on what happens in the vast expanse of story. Think of plot as a collection of events that occur to lead up to the clock: the major ones -- or the fixed, inevitable ones, if you want to think of them that way -- are tentpoles. They hold everything up. You're always moving towards at least one -- and the stuff you're writing right now doesn't have to lead to the next one, necessarily, but the things you set in action can't ignore that next one, either.

Tentpoles in Die Hard: Bruce Willis evades the terrorists when they first take everyone hostage; terrorists become aware of Bruce Willis; BW makes contact with outside world via Twinkiecop; FBI becomes involved. That last one is an inevitable one, pretty much: in the world this story takes place in, the FBI necessarily gets involved in things like this, and so that's an external tentpole -- it isn't something that the other characters deliberately cause (although we quickly find out Hans's plans depend on it, but the point is no one in the story calls the FBI up and tells them to come over), but it affects everything. The others sound inevitable, but only because they define the story so well: if you stop thinking of Die Hard as a fait accompli, and think of the story as "an estranged husband who's a cop on another coast has to protect himself and his wife from clever crooks posing as terrorists," there's no reason why Bruce Willis would have to evade the terrorists initially, nor be separated from his wife, nor involve the outside world ... etc.

2) Dialogue fills up space quicker than action or description do, and still moves the story forward and develops character. Choose a story that puts the characters around each other as much as possible -- if I remember right (I have it right next to me, but I don't think I need to flip through to check), mine was basically all dialogue scenes with only one action scene, and then the expository epilogue.

Dialogue does so much of your work for you. Mind you, I don't mean your whole story should be in quotation marks -- dialogue scenes still need to have some kind of physical action going on, and plot in the sense that what people are saying needs to matter and needs to create and reflect conflict -- but it writes fast, and the pages fill up, and it's easier to let a dialogue scene go on longer than you'd originally intended than it is to try to beef up an action scene.

(Action doesn't have to mean vampires and guns, of course.)

3) It's 1666 words a day, on average, which means if you write 2000 words a day you have, what, five days off. It's even better if you can write a couple hundred words on those "days off" -- you'd be surprised how quickly you can write 200 words, if that's all you're writing that day.

4) The main thing you want to figure out before you start is where you need to start. Again, with mine, I was doing Jesus: but I didn't start with the birth, or the infancy, or the "lost years" ... I started with Jesus leaving John the Baptist's camp. That gave me pretty much exactly as much story as I needed -- but putting that aside, it set things up so that my story wasn't about Jesus's life, it was about Jesus's work. His baptism of/by John is when he sets out on his own, and that's ultimately what leads to his crucifixion. Figure out where your story needs to start in order for the clock to start ticking either right away, or in the first three thousand words, or to have been ticking from the start (in Bishop, the clock's ticking from the start, you just don't know what it is until the end of chapter one.)

5) If you do it in just November, it'll be over before you know it. Two months is a long time. One month, when you've got a wedding and Thanksgiving, goes quick. Next thing you know, you've written a novel.

6) I did it when I was sick! My gallbladder had gone kaput and I didn't even know it for months. I was in pain and not sleeping! If I could do it, you can do it.

(I also did 90% of my research as I wrote, but I didn't have many other committments, and most of them were things I could let slide; this year, I can't do that, and so I'm putting things together now by rewriting an old story from scratch ... probably. Still haven't decided for sure if I'm doing that or Space Robot.)

I was pretty worried about getting to this point where the next bit of real action is quite some time ahead, but it is actually pretty easy to make up every day scenarios as I go along.

My lappy!! You Aussies are too cute. (btw, i really hate using the term 'aussie')

Der beast is being taken by my loverly boyfriend to the fixit shop today (32 degree heat and he's going out in it to trudge out to the burbs, what a dear)... hopefully all will be well by weeks end!

Bit too late for Nano goals now though :( This is the third time Ive tried to write a novel - nano or otherwise - and I just dont think I'm cut out for it. Short stories are my thing. *sigh*

As for me, I've redone the math, and in order to catch up ground lost while I was in New Orleans, I need to write about 2500 words a day till the end of the month (I'm not counting tonight because I may take tonight off and catch up on school nonsense).

I got my NaNoWriMo newsletter over email this morning and it made me all excited. I'm doing it! I'm really doing it! (ha ha)

Brian, I can't make a specific recommendation re: running out of plot since I haven't read your story (my first instinct: "kill someone off in the next chapter"), but there are always ways to keep things going, especially when we aren't desperately concerned with quality. As long as everyone's alive when the plot "ends," there's still more stuff that can happen. Jump forward ten years.

I'm still way behind, but I think I'm more or less caught up to my revised catch-up-from-being-behind schedule, if you see what I mean -- and I've turned in the only paper I have to write before December, and am done with classes for the rest of the month, other than the one I TA for Tuesday morning. I've got a hundred and something papers to grade this weekend, and the morning of December 1st I have to start working on a research paper (cause it's due the morning of December 4th), but... I'm still on the bus.

Anyway, though. Right now I'm speeding up by writing things entirely out of sequence, just writing the scenes I know will happen, and then I'll fill in the blanks that become obvious. It's worked for me before, although usually when I'm closer to the ending.

How's everyone else doing, in the final stretch?

Funnily, I've been writing short story stuff again though, with pen and paper. But I've had a crappy time of it creatively lately, and I'd hoped this would fix everything magically. It didnt.

Still, congratulations to all of you for sticking it out! :)

Except for me. I quit a few weeks ago. I've been writing other things, though, so it isn't a total loss.

Sorry, I'm bad with numbers. It certainly feels like 500,000 at this point.

That's definitely not cheating! I'm gonna be doing something similar.

Congrats, Matt!

The final 20,000 words of it were written this weekend.

Glad to have finished, though. I wasn't as good about keeping with things as I wanted to be during New Orleans and then catching-up-from-New-Orleans, so I'm glad it worked out.

I am belatedly getting in Matt cause I was so up in my own deal last night I didn't even see he'd won! Excellent.

Sarah, 40,000 words is still great, and having stayed on track so long is an accomplishment in of itself. Glad you're going to finish it.

In March: Nanoedmo, which I'd never heard of before, so maybe they didn't do it in 2001, I don't know.

Next up for me -- a research paper due Thursday which I haven't done any reading for yet, another batch of papers to grade, exams, and then I'm going to take a look at this past month's puppy and see if it at least makes sense. Or at least makes sense in the places where I want it to.

I think I got about 50 words, oh dear :/

didn't make it, for various reasons. about halfway though, and i intend to do the other half in the first couple weeks of this month before holiday insanity takes hold again. screw these "rules" maaaan.

i like the march revision idea, i think that could be very helpful. i have a lot of stuff that'd be definitely readable w. some revisions.