NaNoWriMo Anyone?

Plus I'm unemployed, so you know, it's this or drinking wine from ten o'clock in the morning to fill my pointless, pointless days.

Days off are nice aren't they? But then you get horrible word count guilt.

Did you guys who were doing it last year actually finish?

i'm going to try this this year. starts today. wish me luck plz :)

Best of luck, mordy. But remember, when the going gets tough, the tough get logorreah.

dont forget to check twitter hashtag #NaNoWriMoOpeners for cool ideas

"It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times."

Yeah, I'm doing it. I'm unemployed so I reckon I can even make a stab at writing 'properly'.

you have to quit your job to do that.

preferably so you can retreat, as well.

to the country or to a spare room.

I can't quit a job I already don't have :0

yeah this is an experiment that doesn't work for me i found

although it's possible i will spend december in solitary confinement and quarantine for a medical trial so possibly i will write a novel then who knows

i can already tell this doesn't work for me. i need to have a breakthrough in writing fiction successfully (successfully producing fiction that meets minimum threshold of quality for my own subjective opinion) but this isn't going to be it.

What's your block?

the whole point of nanowrimo, as I understand it, is to put aside all thoughts of threshholds for quality, and just start putting words together. ime, there is method to this tomfoolery, in that no one becomes a good writer without writing a lot of crapola - up to a million words of crapola tbh. It's hard to leap past this 'requirement', even though it seems stupid and pointless and unproductive. it isn't. in some ways, it changes your brain.

mordy, just write a heap of crap. you will gain from it, even if the gains are unconcious.

i think too many distractions (full time employment, family w/ child) to devote time i feel it really needs. when i do find time here and there it's too infrequent to build momentum so i have lots of pages i've written here and there that don't congeal. also, often the quality of writing (bc i have so little time to work on it) is way below a threshold that i could feel pride about, which contributes to me feeling uninspired enough to make the time to write more (which would, i'm sure, make the writing quality better, etc).

if you can't find a good uninterrupted hour at at a time to sit and write, then you're probably correct that your attention would be too fragmented to benefit much from the process. frequent distractions dilute the benefits down to insignifigance.

i don't think there's any shame in writing a novella or a short story or short short, but something about nanowrimo seems to suggest that there is such a shame.

i would be ashamed if there was a national tweet writing month though.

mordy, you specifically say the difficulty is fiction. there are a lot of differences between writing fiction and other kinds of writing. as Zora asked, what's the block? or to put it differently, where do you locate your deficiency as a fiction writer?

Aimless is right. You have to write to get better at writing. If your work is coming out in pages here and there due to lack of time, you have a choice of approaches - write faster, or, as PN suggests, write shorter. If immediate quality is your goal, shorter would seem to be the way forward.

I'm a short story writer myself, because I can't sustain either interest or a consistent voice over the length of a novel, and I am a slow, slow, picky, self-editing pain in the arse. Nano is great for me because it forces me to write quickly, and the output may be crappy, but it's given me the bones of 3 novels, 1 of which I edited later (though did not try to sell) and all of which I learned a heap from.

xpost

there's this genre of cellphone fiction in japan that's written on and for cellphones. so i guess even tweet-fiction isn't shameful after all?

I don't have any problem with short fiction or shorter non-fiction. It's a long project over a larger period of time that I struggle with.

mordy, is there anything you can take over from your elite super hexagon performances to help you here? I know that either sounds facetious or obvious (or totally opaque to anyone who doesn't visit the ipod games thread) but it's not meant to - I just think the level of commitment and determination you've shown w/r/t that… what's the diff for you? Is it your expectations with regard to fiction? Differences in bursts of time required?

hexagon games can be busted out in 1-3 minute intervals during the day when i have a free second. i find that kind of burst writing to be really unsatisfying by contrast.

i signed up for this yesterday and i kinda don't think it's for me. i've come up with like 200 words i'm reasonably happy with.

is it somehow less legit to string a series of short stories together and call it a novel?

A good piece of writing is always legitimate, regardless of length, and you know that as well as I do Mr. Philip Nunez. But, if mordy wants to write a novel, but feels he is not quite up to speed on the long-form story, then I think that dashing off a failed attempt would be a good way for him to get loosened up for his next couple of failures, on his way to greater novellian mastery.

However, if you don't have the time, you can't commit the crime. Or something like that.

i think the presence and prevalence of a nanowrimo versus a nashortmo does point to the illegitimacy of shorter forms, in the same way table tennis stars don't command the cultural attention of say, the williams sisters or agassi.

Short stories are not so much shameful as ignored, but that problem hardly starts and ends with NaNo.

J.D. whaddaya mean 'happy with'? Are you reading over what you wrote? Because that is not in the spirit of NaNo. The words don't have to be good, by your standards, nor anyone else's. The point of the exercise is to write, come hell, high water, or the little voice inside you saying 'this isn't good enough'.

If you mean you weren't happy during the production process, idk. More coffee?

what's the daily limit i might try this

1666.6 recurring words per day will get you your 50k

You are starting on day 2 so you need to hit 1724.14.

ta

xp

November has 30 days (you're already short of this allotment, tho) and by the last day of the month you are asked to have a novel of 50,000 words (or more). How you parcel out this allotment over those 30 days is your concern. It averages 1667 words/day, if you write the same number of words every day in November. But it's 1787 words/day if you start tomorrow.

You can easily see how word quantity is the driver, not quality.

Hint: stacking adjectives never hurt anyone's word count.

Lengthy descriptions are great filler. And if anyone isn't used to writing fiction, wants to outline and doesn't know where to start, I write a post about that this morning I can gank from my blog and paste here. Just say (too long to post on the off-chance).

I'm interested. You could even just post a link if you're feeling self-conscious about a text-dump.

is there way to structure it so that if you quit midway through you still have a story, or do they encourage you to write linearly rather than hierarchically?

haha well unfortunately yesterday coincided with a bunch of work shit i had to get done so i didn't find time to get started till like 11. i figured i'd try and catch up tonight.

i am like an insane compulsive reviser/rewriter so this whole 'don't reread what you wrote, don't change it' thing is kind of like learning to swim for me.

OK, here's the link. http://www.firefew.com/?p=212

I don't recall ever seeing any encouragement to structure one way or another. Linked short stories is a good way to make sure you come out with something usable, if you don't mind that what you'll be practicing is short form, rather than long form. Otherwise, one way is to shoot straight through with your main plot line and leave sub-plots for the revision. On a couple of mine I left whole scenes out so that I could get to the end of the book and not lose momentum, where I got too stuck to write fast but I knew what should happen in the *next* scene. That way you come out with a story - though no matter what you do, I wouldn't expect to come out with anything that you'd call finished.

there's a zadie smith quote where she says you need to leave yr manuscript in a drawer for about a year to get distance from it before you can edit it, but the quote is in the new jonah lehrer book so it could be made up.

The idea of letting a manuscript sit in a drawer so you can evaluate it later, with more mature consideration, is much older. I connect it with the seventeenth century when a large percentage authors were amateurs with an independent income, e.g. aristocrats, clergy or academics.

cf. The Third Policeman kinda

Btw got pissed instead

Horace's ars poetica is one big source for that advice: he says you should you put your manuscript away for 9 years.

horse's ass indeed

i have tried nanowrimo in a couple of places and the people you meet who are doing it are pretty much uniformly awful

The trouble with this imo is that 1,500 words a day is too long. You've probably got enough ideas swimming in your head to do one day, and maybe even stretch it to two or three, but unless you've planned carefully beyond that you'll soon be typing complete rubbish you don't believe in purely to get the word count up. Which feels awful. If October had been designated NaNoPlaMo it might work better.

Planning isn't something you have to do and then stop though. In the snowflake method article I linked to in my blog post, lemme link it here... http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php, he says 'do all this then do your first draft', but what I like about the snowflake method is you can go deep on some parts of the novel before you've gone deep on all of them.

I tend to do a really rough outline, very basic 3 acts, x many chapters an act, x many scenes a chapter, mark out where the plot turns need to be (first major conflict here! obstacle to impending romantic developments here!). Then write a line of action for each major plot development. Then planning just becomes part of everyday work. Whatever I'm doing when I'm not writing, I'm thinking about planning the next scene. I know where I'm going, I just need to work out how to express it.

It's an obsessive thing, but if I'm not obsessing about writing, writing doesn't really happen for me.

This thread needs a status update for all who toil in NaNoWriMo's delusive mines.

I wish I had done this, I had a project perfect for this. Maybe I'll be unofficial and start my NaNoWriMo today/tomorrow

That 'tomorrow' gives it all away I'm afraid

I've used this as an excuse to start writing again but I still haven't been able to devote as much time to it as I'd like. No way will I have anything even approaching novel-length at the end of the month, but it's totally been worthwhile. At the very least I have a decent-sized pile of ideas that may be worth developing further some day.

I'm languishing at 28.5k while I work out the tricky getting-to-the-climax plot sequence. I regret posting all the smuggo bollox above about planning. I forgot how tough it actually is, and how much hand waving you can do on an outline that you then have to back up with something substantial.... Owch.

Zora, I have every confidence that you will knit your brow, ignite your brain, come up with a searingly adequate idea and finish in a blaze of acceptability.

yeah totes Zora you still have ten days left

anyhow: if I start tomorrow my end time would be Dec 21, Ismael

I look forward to getting it for Christmas

Thanks for the votes of confidence! What I'm coming up with at the moment is a searingly hokey idea and I expect to be finishing in a blaze of cliche, but hey ho.

Start today, Drugs A!

...i was never here...

(j/k I have about two or three page head start already and I guess I'm going to spend the remaining hour before work typing it up, but despite best efforts I didn't get any writing done. But hey Ismael I will totally send you a copy of the manuscript for Christmas)

make sure you remember the dedication

Hobbled over the 35k line this evening. So I'm still aahhhh loads off target, but the graph looks a bit healthier. My B protagonist is in the mine with the tentacled thing. Anyone else still in?

> My B protagonist is in the mine with the tentacled thing.

would read

B isn't for Baggins is it?

It is not. But such is the degree of my hobbity brainwashing that I cannot write a novel without tunnels in it.

okay I gotta come clean, this fell apart pretty quickly

I offer you absolution at a cut rate price.

"NaNoWriMo Goes Bankrupt After Embracing AI"

https://futurism.com/nanowrimo-closing-embracing-ai

I had forgotten it existed… I think even the ping pong table the founder stored in my space in the garage (one of those “I rarely think about this, but when I do it makes me angry” things) has finally been removed by my landlord.

I don't think their statement on AI was out of bounds. Poorly phrased certainly.

lol, it was a bunch of tendentious fluff-brained bollocks