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NaNoWriMo Starts Next Week! Who's Participating?
This will be my third attempt over the last 5 years but it'll also be the first time I have real time to dedicate to actually doing this. I'm really, really excited.
I have a Chromebook now so I'll likely be writing primarily on Google Docs. What are your writing plans? By hand? Scrivener?
I'm going for it this year! I've done a fair bit of fiction writing (non professionally, and over 50k words), but not all during one month. It'll be a new challenge for me, but I think I'm game. I want to tie it into December and try to target 90k-100k by the end of the year, so I can forget it and do a second pass on the draft in June or so. I'll probably set higher daily writing targets, and it's going to offset lots of my normal reading time, but I think it'll be wroth it.
I've already begun drafting out ideas for setting and plot (about 2.5k words in planning notes) and have been pitching it to trusted friends for feedback, but I need to crunch a bit more before November begins to craft characters I could love. I'm planning a dystopian fiction (which will touch a bit on political and social commentary) which is a new genre for me to write in, but I think I'll do okay at hacking it out because I eat up that sort of content. Next steps are characters and outlining, probably this weekend.
You sound so prepared! I hope to feel that way too by next Thursday. Trying to use this week to get there. Problem for me is that I don't have a single idea I want to focus on yet.
What do you use to write?
I write with Scrivener on macOS. I have lot of experience with it years ago when I was writing more actively, so it's been natural to just jump into a scrivener project here. That said, I will have to be a whole lot more organized and I'll have to start pre-outlining scenes, main plot elements, etc. in the project.
I am a huge promoter of Scrivener, not necessarily for its writing environment (even though it was easy just to write in scrivener a ton) but for the sheer number of specialized author tools. Back when I was writing ebooks, I had one massive Scrivener project that contained all of my projects, and used one single project to wire up front and back matter, so that way I had export consistency, and the pieces that I'd reuse between content remained consistent and easily updatable. As an engineer by day, Scrivener feels like a tool someone would build after asking "what if we made Xcode but for authors".
My biggest gripe with Scrivener is their sync solution—I bought Scrivener iOS before I realized it was Dropbox sync only. I think Dropbox is far too messy of an app to use on macOS and am not comfortable installing it on my machine. It would lovely if it supported iCloud sync, but I think that will just remain a dream.
I've had an idea stewing since the end of last summer. It's changed a lot in that time, to the point of being unrecognizable, but I feel that's it's matured as well as it will in my head. With NaNoWriMo right around the corner, it seems a good time to make this thing exist in a slightly-more tangible way.
I don't anticipate finishing before the end of November; I'll be writing something Science-Fiction, and those tend to be much longer than a standard literary novel. But if I can hit that 50k word-count, I'll be more than happy. If I make it that far I figure I'll have the momentum to keep going, perhaps until the entire first draft is done.
I'll probably be using OneNote on my desktop to write it out. I was planning on just using Word, but this seems like a good way to keep my thoughts right there when I need them, as opposed to in a separate document somewhere.
I've let anxiety stop me in years prior, but I feel like I've reached a point where I'm just so bored of being anxious to give it any power this time. I can belt out thousands of words at once when talking about something I know, there's no reason I can't do the same here. It'll be shit, for sure, but that's what first drafts are for.
That's the one thing I miss about a regular laptop - OneNote. That program is awesome.
You are so on target with anxiety. That's been my problem in my previous tries. I'm going to try and emulate your perspective and be bored by it too! Thank you for sharing. I hope all goes well for you and you make it to your 50k count!
I've tried a few, completed once and I recommend that everyone should invest in accomplishing NaNoWriMo, but I don't think I ever want to do it again. I'm a very succinct writer so the process of generating 1500 words/day was not fun at all. That was in my native language, so I may consider trying in English which most of my friends feel it's easier.
The difference that made it possible to finish for me was to plan every chapter, so I knew what points I had to hit every day. I also had to prepare a story for multiple protagonists as a strategy to increase the word count.
As a tool, I would recommend Jotter Pad for Android, because I know portability helps a lot and it's nice to be able to write in the bus or while waiting in line.
If you don't mind me asking, what's your native language?
Portuguese, very beautiful when written correctly, very hard to get it just right.
That's very cool! I hope you write something in Portuguese one day.
I did, the one time I mentioned having completed NaNoWriMo was in Portuguese, that was the problem.
I did it two or three years in high school and then once in college but then ended up getting too busy with life.
This is actually one of the first years since graduating that I've considered trying to do it again, although I'm not sure I've got a topic yet.
This didn't exist when I was in high school but man I wish it did. I feel like having the experience "forced" on me would make it easier to approach it blindly as an adult.
I am very excited to say that I WILL be participating this year as I got a job with less hours and weekends off. I might not be able to get to 50k but it'll be a great way to get back into writing after having such a long break from it. I think I'll focus more on rewriting some short stories and creating a few new ones.
Did it last year, and failed.
Would love to do it this year, but I just don't have the time or the spoons.
I try and participate in both NaNoWriMo and NaNoGenMo, though I've only finished the former once.
For writing, I've used both EverNote and OneNote, and they work fairly well, but I find just writing in flat files works the best for me - I have a server and laptop I can access anywhere in the world by SSH, so I can write on a phone, a tablet, laptop or desktop computer. Lets me stop and start however I like, and not get caught up in bending the interface to do this one strange thing I want to do (like in Orkenfall).
I won't be officially participating with a new project, but I will be trying to wrap up one of my ongoing projects during this timeframe. Well, two, I guess - my serialized novel, which is in the final rounds of redrafting and editing the first draft; and then I'll pick up one of my other partially-finished longform works and try to push through to finish it. Honestly, I care less about wordcount and 50k than I do about finishing something, since I struggle so much with declaring anything done, even in draft form.
I just did a wordcount on my drafts folder and found that between completed and incomplete projects I have written 432K words since August 2017. That's around 28k words per month. Of that stuff, there is 1 completed novella, many completed poems and short stories, 1 near-complete novel lacking a final chapter, 1 not-at-all complete novel that I will simply have to return to at a later time, and 3 novellas that are also incomplete. So it seems that aiming to finish one of these things is the way to go for me.
Small idea: Release a collection of short stories.
It's a little less effort, and might give you the boost you need to move towards something complete.
That is very well - meaning and wise. I view a lot of them as 'learning about writing' experiments though, even if they're technically done, and just the thought of whipping a collection of them into publishing shape is enough to make me weep. I will do some kind of story collection someday for sure, but making it to the end of redrafting my novel is what gets me hyped up for November!