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National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is only two months away!
Each November hundreds of thousands of writers attempt a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. Results vary, but it's a ton of concentrated writing and storytelling practice and always a blast, especially if you're in a region with meet-ups. More information at nanowrimo.org.
Is anyone here participating? This will be my fourth year (after a good ten-year break) and my third as a Municipal Liaison (regional coordinator) setting up events in coffee shops and libraries. Are you already planning what you'll write, or just letting inspiration strike on the first? Any great tales from years past?
There are fantasy authors who can belt out tens of thousands of words a day, but I'm not one of them. I'm lucky if I can manage 1,500 a day, but maybe it would help if I quit all social media and non-writing forums...
Well, you belted out 44 words in this comment. Does that count?
Not really.
<sigh> That was an attempt at lighthearted humour. Sorry.
My fault. I'm a bit tired.
<creates a meta post on how even our most serious users are falling prey to low effort jokes.>
<lip quiver> But it wasn't low-effort! I had to count the words in that comment - all 44 of them! That took effort!
You manually counted them? Unix has a tool for that.
So does Microsoft Word: I could have copied the text there. But sometimes you want to hand-craft a joke, to give it that personal touch. :)
I've always thought it was a good event to encourage writers but I've never done it myself--1000+ words a day is simply too fast a past to maintain quality and avoid burnout. A few hundred words a day each and every day is better. Or at least that's how I am, maybe if you're writing like a fantasy novel you could output manuscript faster, I don't know.
I don't know that we can make any absolute statement about how quickly a piece of well-crafted art (whether a novel, play, painting, or song) should take. It's so highly contingent upon the artist, their work, and their style.
Even a single author might assume two wildly different approaches to two different pieces.
For example, it took approximately a decade for Kazuo Ishiguro to complete The Buried Giant (the most 'fantastical' of his novels), but he finished The Remains of the Day in just one month.
For me, Nanowrimo is an experiment I wish I had tried in days when I had more free time. And perhaps I will give it a shot some day. But, like you, I'm not sure it's entirely congenial to my style.
Try making the outline ahead of time. That way you can write to a schedule and ensure that your story doesn't sprawl everywhere. It may also help to write the ending first to keep it concise and not have the story continue beyond where you want it to go.
My process is idea -> rough outline -> rough draft -> thematically complete draft -> final draft. The third takes the longest by far.
The only other piece of advice I can offer is to include some 'optional' subplots that you can write up and tear down as you need. But to be honest, it's a terrible idea. The NaNoWriMo word count requirement is arbitrary. It doesn't matter if you don't reach it, it only matters if you are happy with what you write.
I might unofficially participate this year.
I'm already in the outlining phase for a story, and I work best with deadlines. Might be a good way to churn out my shitty first draft.
Kill Bill sirens In all seriousness I usually look forward to this every year, but probably won't fully participate. Last year was the furthest I had gotten at something close to 20k words but the story ran out of steam and I had absolutely no fucking clue how to continue on from that point. This year I'll get lucky if I even make it to 10k. My work schedule is dumb and my free time severely limited but as a writer, I would love to get in even just the tiiiiiiniest bit of writing for NaNoWriMo.
I did last years nano, but fell off a bit to actually finish mid-December. This year’s project isn’t proving to be 50k words. So maybe I’ll be unofficially writing more, but not the full effort.
Fuuuuuuuuuck the year's gone by way too fast.
I've never tried it, and my life is so busy at the moment that I have no chance of making 50k in a single month, but I think I might aim for 80k - 90k twice in six months in the hopes of having two novel manuscripts by this time next year.
I've done NaNo for a few years now. The first year, I aimed for 50k and didn't make it but did write a bunch of words. The next time, I just aimed for 25k. This month I'll be aiming for 50k. It's just a vehicle for manifesting the thing you already want to see in the world, at least for me.
I'm considering doing this. It's a bit spur-of-the-moment, but some recent events have made me want to try something different. And, I've had an idea for a novel brewing in the back of my head for years.
Of course, the novel I want to write is a historical novel, requiring lots of research and in-depth knowledge - but two weeks out is plenty of time for that... right? :P
For NaNoWriMo two weeks is plenty of time! You just botch it hardcore this year, then come back next year and do the same one over but better! You may find that some of your best ideas come from just working through it with no expectation of the first run meeting any standards.
Yeah... no. I'm not writing the same book twice. I'm happy to get it started next month as a rough draft, then edit it later. But there's no way I'm doing the same work twice.