# NaNoWriMo



## Frasque (Oct 16, 2008)

Anyone else doing it this year? Scotty mentioned it on another thread, and I thought I'd throw it out there. If you've never heard of it, the basic idea is to write an entire novel during the month of November.


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## GatodeCafe (Oct 16, 2008)

I've got a head start. Which is technically cheating, but fuck it! I'm going to write the damn thing on the bus to and from my university (3 hours a day, easy.)


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## Chex (Oct 16, 2008)

Aww, but cheating isn't the point. :<

I'm doing it, too, but I'm not starting until November proper.   1667 words a day is nothin'. Depending on how occupied I am, I can churn out about 15,000 over the course of several hours.


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## Xipoid (Oct 16, 2008)

I am heavily considering doing this, but I am not sure how my inner perfectionist will take it. Though I am curious to see what I write when I do not attempt _any_ quality control.


Wait a minute... I just signed up without realizing it. I guess I know what I'll be doing next month.


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## Kender3421 (Oct 16, 2008)

I might do it depending on my work load in November. I work retail and we all know what happens the day after thanksgiving.


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## M. LeRenard (Oct 16, 2008)

Nah.  I get the feeling I won't ever do this.  I'd rather work on my already existing novel(s) than start a new one just to see how much I can write in a month.  Not to mention, I know I'd never reach the goal in time.  I probably write an average of 100 words a day.  Most of the time I just don't have the time/energy to do any more than that.  And November is a particularly nasty month for school, since you're nearing the end of the semester, and all of those long writing projects you've been assigned in all of your classes start getting due, as well as second midterms and then eventually finals.  They should change NaNoWriMo to December, when everybody's home on Christmas break doing nothing.  Seriously.  Or maybe during the summer sometime, like August.  Nobody has plans for August.


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## Poetigress (Oct 16, 2008)

Xipoid said:


> I am heavily considering doing this, but I am not sure how my inner perfectionist will take it.



From experience -- they cry and scream a little when you first start out, but eventually they shut up.


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## Frasque (Oct 16, 2008)

Yeah, I've always thought November was an odd choice, it sucks for people in school and for people who work retail and are usually on long, busy shifts. It's not supposed to be something you stress over tho, it's just for fun.


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## nachoboy (Oct 17, 2008)

i'm planning on doing it, yeah. i'm pumped and have all kinds of ideas for it.


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## ScottyDM (Oct 20, 2008)

NaNo management says you _must_ work on a new novel and you _must not_ start writing before November 1st.


			
				http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node/402737 said:
			
		

> *Do I have to start my novel from scratch on November 1? Can I use an outline?*
> 
> Yes.
> 
> ...


What bunk!

*First*, this assumes that you and I are _just like_ NaNo management and that we'll get bogged down in editing if we start early. Poppycock!

*Second*, NaNo is a personal experience set in the framework of a national-something-or-other. No one's looking over your shoulder. Yea, they do keep track of your word count, but as long as your word count is accurate, what should they care? There are plenty of professionally published authors who don't use NaNo.

NaNo has value. The first two of Heinlein's rules of writing are: #1, You must write. #2, You must complete something. NaNo can turn dreamers and wannabees into writers. Maybe not very good or skillful writers, but even with fabulous technique you're not a writer unless you write something and you finish it.

Okay, so *third*, I am a NaNo pirate! Punishable by death? Ha! The act of _being_ a pirate is punishable by death. Hollow threats by NaNo management are nothing to me. In fact I wrote a song I call, You're a NaNo Pirate! Ahhh, well I mighta pirated the melody, and I mighta pirated most of the words, but my heart was in the right place.  


So this year I will be writing fiction, and they will be fresh words (no edits of existing stuff). Will it be a novel? Probably not. I've got nine icons on my desktop for nine storyworlds, each with one or more unfinished (or never started) stories. Yea, there are a couple of novels in there--but that doesn't mean I'll pick one and work exclusively on that. And it 'specially don't mean I'll dream up a fresh novel for 2008. Heinlein's second rule, ya know.

My goal for NaNo this year is 50,000 fresh words of fiction. Them's my self-imposed rules. Nothin' else counts.

*I do what I want 'cause a pirate is free. I'm a NaNo pirate!*

Scotty


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## sashadistan (Oct 26, 2008)

I'm signed on for this years month of toil. I won last year, so this year I'm pulling out all stops for a fantasy Extrrrrravgaza. Should be fun.

If anyone wants to find me on there I'm listed under Silvan Arown Eli Fisher.

Here's to November!


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## sashadistan (Nov 15, 2008)

So, those of you who are doing Nano this year, how far have you got? i'm slightly behind on 22000 words, but hopefully i'll pass 30000 on Novelling Tuesday (my day of dedication).

Anyone else?


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## Kindar (Nov 15, 2008)

I can't participate in that since I'm not capable of working on only one story.


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## Stratelier (Nov 15, 2008)

17,000, desparately needing to crack 20k <s>toady</s> TODAY.

(Uh oh, the Nanoisms are spreading....)

But my plot, that is to say the "real" conflict of my novel still has yet to appear.  So what I've written so far is 17,000 words of NOTHING INTERESTING.

As for the central conflict itself . . . it's a TF sequence.  Usually, I won't even touch those with a ten-foot pole, but the remainder of this story is built around it and this isn't a kind of TF sequence you see everyday.

I also mocked up a chart of my progress via Excel.  Guess what -- as much as I feel behind, I'm actually on schedule with last year!


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## ScottyDM (Dec 1, 2008)

Well, NaNo is over for me for one more year.

I write far too slowly to make a serious go at NaNo--about 250 words per hour. And yes, I did put in a few eight-hour writing days. But I couldn't sustain that. I might have hit 30,000 words, but I didn't even write anything seven days. I was sick for five, but I also allowed myself to become distracted. For example by Thanksgiving. Anyway, I hit 23,312 words.

They're pretty good words too. I'm sure that in edit I'll throw out a few, but mostly I'll shuffle them between chapters. For NaNo last year I decided to toss my entire first chapter and start with chapter 2. It's better.

Here's an excerpt (unedited):





> â€œAnything,â€ she said. â€œI would do anything for you. Anything you need.â€
> 
> _If only you could._
> 
> ...



Scotty


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## Stratelier (Dec 1, 2008)

I was able to finish mine (sort of), my ending was kinda rushed but then again I did insist on being done by the 30th...  I actually managed to write marginally faster this year (56k in 26 days' writing, last year was 55k in 27), but really some of the things I wrote in it . . . just filler.  No plans for editing or returning to this novel afterwards.


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## ScottyDM (Dec 1, 2008)

Cool beans, Strata!

There were a couple of people in the Colorado Springs group who mentioned they didn't really care about the end product and had no intent to try to improve their novel after the 30th. And then there's me, who is far more interested in the end product than getting 1,667 words per day. So why do we do this?

I did NaNo in '05, but had no plan and only managed about 9,000 words before I quit to work on a plan and do research. Then in '07 I managed a little over 21,000 words and when I realized I'd never make the 50,000 I quit about a week before the end of the month. This year I wrote nearly every day I could, and still didn't come close to 50,000--I'm just plain slow.

So will I do NaNo next year? Not sure. I went to the kickoff party and that was fun. And I'd like to go to the TGIO party tomorrow night (gotta clear it with Mrs. Badger). But I didn't make any of the writeins. Maybe for the social aspect, but if I don't go to any of the writeins then... why am I doing this again? It also seems kinda dumb to only work on a novel in November. Or to ignore other writing projects during that month.

{bewitched}
{bothered}
{bewildered}

Scotty


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## Shouden (Dec 2, 2008)

isn't it DeNoWriMo now?


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## Poetigress (Dec 2, 2008)

ScottyDM said:


> Cool beans, Strata!
> 
> There were a couple of people in the Colorado Springs group who mentioned they didn't really care about the end product and had no intent to try to improve their novel after the 30th. And then there's me, who is far more interested in the end product than getting 1,667 words per day. So why do we do this?
> 
> ...



Frankly, I don't mean any personal offense, but I think you're kind of missing the point of NaNo, Scotty, or at least the point the way I see it.  

I've always felt it's about remembering that writing is supposed to be fun, and celebrating what can happen spontaneously when we let ourselves play and write what we really like, and when we push ourselves past our inhibitions so that we can write something without worrying over every single line.  As I look at it, if I end up with something in December that may eventually be publishable, that's great, but that's not the goal.  It's a challenge, an exercise -- an experience, really, without trying to sound too mystical about it.  Or as I like to put it with the Thursday Prompt, it's about process, not product.  People who run the Boston Marathon don't complain that they should have just taken a cab instead to go that distance.

For myself, as far as the social aspect goes, I was never able to go to any of the local events the two years I participated, but there was still something neat to me about knowing that other writers around the world were focused on the same thing at the same time.  It wasn't just "yeah, I'm working on some stuff, I'll get it done one of these days" it was, "I'm doing NaNoWriMo, and here's my progress so far."  And even people who weren't writers often had heard of NaNo, and understood what was going on.  It turned writing into something far more communal and quantifiable than it normally is for most people.

That's my take on it, anyway.  *shrug*


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## ScottyDM (Dec 2, 2008)

Poetigress said:


> Frankly, I don't mean any personal offense, but I think you're kind of missing the point of NaNo, Scotty, or at least the point the way I see it.


No offense taken, and you may be right.



Poetigress said:


> I've always felt it's about remembering that writing is supposed to be fun, and celebrating what can happen spontaneously when we let ourselves play and write what we really like, and when we push ourselves past our inhibitions so that we can write something without worrying over every single line.  As I look at it, if I end up with something in December that may eventually be publishable, that's great, but that's not the goal.  It's a challenge, an exercise -- an experience, really, without trying to sound too mystical about it.  Or as I like to put it with the Thursday Prompt, it's about process, not product.  People who run the Boston Marathon don't complain that they should have just taken a cab instead to go that distance.


I'm still exploring how best to write for me. Everyone's a bit different and what works for some won't work for others. I've tried just writing and letting the characters lead, and I've tried breaking an outline down into sceneletts (fractions of a scene). Sometimes letting the characters lead gets you whole chapters that don't do anything for the story, or filler, that just have to be edited out later. And planning down page by page can be too restrictive, even if it is a way recognize in advance if a chapter is worth writing or not.

This year I came up with some descriptive working titles for some of my needed chapters, created starter files (title page, etc.) for each chapter. Then when it came time to write one, I thought about a few major events in the chapter (typically four) and wrote those down as pieces (e.g. "Piece 1: The Gate Keeper") and started writing. I kind of let things carry me where they went. It worked pretty well. There were times when I knew where I wanted to be a page from now, but couldn't think of how to get there. There was a time I wrote a full page, then decided it was in the wrong place (I just lined it through rather than deleted it). And there was a time when I wrote two lines and decided the direction was all wrong and the subject shouldn't even come up in the story till six weeks later--so I deleted those lines.

The result is that one of my chapters has a bit too much stuff in it. I need to pace the unfolding of the relationship and so I'll be moving some things to later chapters, but everything that's in there (in general) needs to be somewhere in the book. The other chapter is good (if still incomplete) but I have this vast chunk in the middle that rambles.

Maybe it's the way my brain is wired, but I can't write if I don't know a character's name or some term. I've tried putting in "___", but then it glares at me. I must know. And if I can't think of how to get from the bottom of page 22 to the top of page 24, I can't just write a page full of randomness. If the story starts going in the wrong direction, I can't just write it back, I must delete and rewrite. And I'm still not sure the best time of day for me to write.

But a valuable lesson from NaNo: Write _something_ every day.

Scotty
who did this stream-of-consciousness style


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## Poetigress (Dec 3, 2008)

Oh yeah, believe me, I know everyone works differently.  >^_^<  I was just referring to the way NaNo is theoretically meant to work.  I certainly write differently during NaNo than I usually do, process-wise -- otherwise, I don't think I would have made it both years.  But it taught me that I _can_ produce much more in a shorter period of time than I thought I could, if I focus and push forward and leave the editing to the second draft (and write what I really want to write).

It's true that letting the characters lead sometimes gets you stuff that has to be edited out.  But sometimes those scenes can also get you insight into the character that helps even when that material doesn't show up on the page (much like the worldbuilding details you were talking about in another thread). But then, as you know by now, I tend to be a pretty organic writer most of the time, avoiding outlines as much as possible and letting the story and characters develop on their own.  

Sometimes I can write without a character's name, but usually just if they're a minor character.  I wind up with characters named ~~~, %%%, @@@ and so on, so that I can then do a find-and-replace in Word once I do come up with the name.  Major characters, though, usually have to have something settled before I can get a handle on them.


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