NaNoWriMo 2010 !!!

[peanutter]

ladies and gentlewriters of all shapes and sizes - nano is fast approaching.

but fear not! it is still t-5, so you have time my lovely possums to sharpen your pencils if not your wits, dust off your erasers, and calculate how much coffee and how many tim tams you will need to sustain you through your nanowrimo blitz!!

who's with me??

[AnyDream]

Ohhhh I've definitely had Nanowrimo on my radar for 2 years now. First Nov we were leading up to a *huge* interstate move & then I developed gallstone attacks...then last year I was in the lead up to having a mastectomy and still totally chemo-addled...not sure that I've got it in me this year, I still need extra rest & sleep. But then I think - there will always be some sort of excuse of why not to, sometimes you just need to commit to things.

Does it matter whether you go fiction or non-fiction?

ETA - and isn't the temptation to just pour forth 50K words of crappola just to get it done?

[Miss.September]

Can you elaborate for me Peanutter? Haven't heard of this before. Ta

[peanutter]

absolutely. save for typos which I correct as I go, I try not to fix up ANYTHING.

the other thing I do which I find really helps, is my self imposed "square brackets rule" which is that if I can't think of a specific word that I want, or I am on a red hot streak with one part of the story, I will summarie in square brackets what comes there, and keep going with the flow.

eg: [chapter 14 will be where Gabe realises that the girl he sold the car to is actually Ben's new fiance, and that he's going to be in *big* trouble ... Helen will come back on the radar at work, too]

or even [chapter 14 - Gabe]

and then I'll just keep running with whatever is going well.

Otherwise I'll spend 30 minutes pondering how to phrase the next bit of dialogue, the next scene entrance, where they are, what colour the grime on the dashboard is, etc ...

And I'm even worse with words - sometimes I'll have a mental blank and KNOW that I know the perfet word, but it just won't come to me, and I'll spend litterally 10+ minutes trying to push it out of my brain ... but I "square brackets" it, keep going, and just whevever the word hits me, I go back and insert it. Sometimes I use *** or ### so I can use control + f to jump right to it, so I don't have to trawl through pages looking for the blank...

[Kamarine]

absolutely. save for typos which I correct as I go, I try not to fix up ANYTHING.

the other thing I do which I find really helps, is my self imposed "square brackets rule" which is that if I can't think of a specific word that I want, or I am on a red hot streak with one part of the story, I will summarie in square brackets what comes there, and keep going with the flow.

eg: [chapter 14 will be where Gabe realises that the girl he sold the car to is actually Ben's new fiance, and that he's going to be in *big* trouble ... Helen will come back on the radar at work, too]

or even [chapter 14 - Gabe]

and then I'll just keep running with whatever is going well.

Otherwise I'll spend 30 minutes pondering how to phrase the next bit of dialogue, the next scene entrance, where they are, what colour the grime on the dashboard is, etc ...

And I'm even worse with words - sometimes I'll have a mental blank and KNOW that I know the perfet word, but it just won't come to me, and I'll spend litterally 10+ minutes trying to push it out of my brain ... but I "square brackets" it, keep going, and just whevever the word hits me, I go back and insert it. Sometimes I use *** or ### so I can use control + f to jump right to it, so I don't have to trawl through pages looking for the blank...

THat's some really good advice. I must admit I spend time dithering around with stuff like that. Or deleting and re-writing. I've managed to curb it a lot lately.

I'm officially at 40,000 words. How are you going?

[AnyDream]

Awesome work!!!! Keep going you can get this done!!!

Peanutter that is fantastic advice. I use a similar technique (esp when I'm casting about for words, which is all the time since chemotherapy LOL), I use XXX (easily searchable) and I have been known to highlight in a different colour and leave that there to come back to. I like your square brackets method.

Wanna know what I've been up to in Nov instead of Nanowrimo? It's a blog....definitely not 50K but it's involved the discipline of turning out something every day (well nearly), and has been worthwhile from that perspective.