Posted by Aura in General, Aura
Here’s my first NaNoWriMo post, to get the ball rolling.
E - give us some pointers in how you tackle this beast!
I’ve already given my book some thought, and do not like what I have come up with. The old me would have scrapped the idea, but I think I’ll suffer through it, even if I don’t like the end product.
That’s the whole point for me - to not abort, especially before I’ve even gotten started.
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Jumping right in. I like that. I think we will get a lot of help from the forums once they’re up again, too.
The big things for me:
I found an excel file on the forums that helped me track how many words I was writing a day, how many I had left, if I was behind on it (it shows by how much in red)and how much I’d have to write each day to catch up… I’ll send that to you guys when I refind it. Keeping track of it and of just the amount I had to write each day (rather than the final number) helped a lot. I sat down and wrote stream-of-consciousness-style a couple times before hand to remind myself that 1667 words a day isn’t much (and I told myself to write a minimum of 2000 daily..) If I didn’t write for a day I’d write 2000 the next day and then as soon as there was a moment I’d go sit somewhere and write till I caught up (sometimes that would take a couple sessions but not a lot)… I wouldn’t let failing one day stop me from plugging on the next day (I learned that from weightloss).
I put a calendar as the wallpaper for my home and work computer that was pretty and said under each date how many words I should be at at each point… I was often behind but it helped to know where I should be and I’d make sure I caught up and jumped ahead occasionally.
Each day when I wrote as much as I could think of to write I’d go back over what I’d written that day (and that day only) and flesh it out a little, add a description or two, some lines of dialogue, whatever… I’d just go over it untill I got to the 1700-2000 words I wanted to write minimum each day.
I used my pda and set it up so I could write at any moment, using my commute time and those little scraps of time that I’d be waiting for people or waiting for something to start or during lunch and while waiting for the computer to do something really helped. I’d only keep that day’s writing in there and I’d load it up onto an MS word doc with the rest of the novel at the end of the day (or as soon as I could)… but other than marking places where I could add another scene or had missed a scene (which I would occasionally add later in the month) I would not let myself edit, flesh in or in any way go over previous days’ writings… I would have scared myself into stopping.
I’d let myself skip forward or go off the sketchy outline… a lot of ideas will come to you as you write. Seriously trust that as long as you keep putting words down during the hard moments you’ll soon run into some great idea and find yourself wizzing through a couple thousand excitedly.
For an idea last year I just kept pushing at every little thing that came to my mind so that my ultra-crappy-scrappy idea got fleshed out a bit… Every time I though about something I could write I’d ask myself how it could be melded into the other ideas… rather than letting it be its own seperate concept.
I did not read during nano…Hard to do but absolutely necessary since I took that time for writing and I couldn’t compare myself and scare myself.
I let myself write without worrying, I told myself no one would have to ever see it and it was only to prove to myself that I could do it… I could write 50000 connected words in one month with an understandable, consistent plot … I told myself I could edit later or scrap it and it wouldn’t matter. That upon proving to myself that I can do it at all a couple times I won’t be able to scare myself out of writing that good novel.
I think there were other tricks, I’ll tell them when I remember them. For you Aura I bet participating in some of the write-offs (where you write more words in a certain amount of time or add certain things) might be good, add a bit of competitiveness (in fact if you could place a bet that’d be good).
I think I promised myself something… like a present… for when I completed. I usually do that when I’m trying to succeed at something hard, though once I get the thing done I rarely actually get myself the present ’cause the completion ends up being an award and because I pamper myself a lot anyway and there’re other things to buy/do… etc… but promising myself something helps during the hard moments.