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Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
Wooo! I was wondering when a NaNo 2020 thread would pop up!

I'm doing a rewrite of Sharon Green's terrible Blending series which is going to be fantasy/adventure rather than the original fantasy/romance. My profile: https://nanowrimo.org/participants/leng

We're less than a week away AHHHHH and despite being in the last stage of my outlining I'm now having doubts. Here's to the extreme yoyo emotions that is the process of creation.

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Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today

Devorum posted:

I'm in with what will likely be an awful attempt at LitRPG.

YESSSS! LitRPG is fun!

Pixelante posted:

I'm on the fence. I enjoy building characters and worlds, but fall flat on my face when it comes to plot.

In addition to the great advice that's already been given, 50k words of anything counts for NaNo. Even 50k of character and world building.

Also if you can build characters you can definitely do plot, since all character backstory by definition consists of plot that happened in their past!

Enchanted Hat posted:

Hey, I've seen your thread--you are phenomenally well-prepared :colbert:. It's going to be great!

I did a quick calculation of rough hourly word count in my outline and uh, let's just say if that's the pace I'll actually be writing at, I don't have enough writing time blocked.

EDIT: typos

Leng fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Oct 28, 2020

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
Thread title is the best thread title. I just attempted trying to break down my plot according to individual chapters and...it did not go well. I'm questioning my outline, my ability and my sanity for wanting to do this. Suddenly 50k words seems like a lot of words. Please someone tell me how to turn off my overthinking brain so I can get over this fear and just write next week.

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
According to my schedule I am not supposed to start writing until tomorrow but I found a few hours this morning so I have decided the schedule can get stuffed, I'm going to start anyway. Happy NaNo everyone!

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today

ConanThe3rd posted:

Doing good, 2.1k for my first day, upped the day par to 1800 so I can take one day per week off if I really need it.

Staggy posted:

~8,400 words on day one.

Enchanted Hat posted:

Man, goons putting me to shame! I've done 2,291 words so far. I'm very much on track with my outline and my predicted word counts, so I'm feeling optimistic!

Pikestaff posted:

I was on a roll and didn't want to stop :shobon:



2213 words on a not-writing day today. I need to catch up with you 7-10kers tomorrow!

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
3757 words today. I'm gonna need to rethink my writing schedule. Clearly I can't hit 6-7k words per day as a NaNo newbie.

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
Don't worry! I'm in the same boat too. 517 words yesterday. There was an amazing post in the self-publishing thread that I thought was pretty relevant to NaNo:

angel opportunity posted:

I've been releasing 2-3 50,000-word novels per month

angel opportunity posted:

With all that said, I find that "non-readers" like me have a pretty big advantage when it comes to writing really fast. When I used to write stuff for the Thunderdome, I was hyper-aware of how I would judge it as a reader, because I was writing stuff purely for fun. I was writing what I would want to read myself. Now I am writing things that I don't like to read, and so I use the Pomodoro method. I set a timer for 20 minutes and write non-stop for twenty minutes, usually producing between 900-1,200 words. I take a 6-minute break and repeat. I try to do this for two hours to produce 5,000 words in a two-hour chunk. My first drafts are very clean, and my editing pass for a full novel takes maybe 6-7 hours. My editing pass will be fixing typos, mistakes, and occasionally making some sentences sound better. I never edit anything as I write, and I never go back and look at what I wrote until a book is finished.

"Readers" really struggle with this kind of thing and generally write much more slowly. They also tend to let what they personally like get in the way a lot

That's my problem in a nutshell. I think I'm going to give this method a shot. I have editing time blocked tomorrow to calm my reader brain so here's hoping I can just churn out words today.

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today

Leng posted:

I think I'm going to give this method a shot. I have editing time blocked tomorrow to calm my reader brain so here's hoping I can just churn out words today.

I cannot for the life of me get this method to work. :cry: 3463 words today for at least 8 hours of writing. How do I write good faster?

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today

Staggy posted:

[good stuff about ThingsToChange.txt]

Just got through another 1158 words in the last 3 hours and I'm going to take a half hour break. What it did make me realize is the thing that is slowing me down the most is my prose, because I'm working out so many details about character and setting as I write. In the last session, I stopped writing to:
  • Fiddle with word choice
  • Google random world building details that I didn't realize I needed until I sat down to write the scene
  • Block out detailed plot stuff on the individual beat level. Like the chapter breakdown in my outline says "this character is tested for magical ability", so when I sit down to actually write the chapter, I have to figure out: a) what the test actually is, then b) all of the individual beats in the scene, and c) make sure I've strung all of them into a solid, self-contained plot or character arc within the chapter
And when I say I stopped writing, I mean that I sat there staring at the blinking cursor, debating three or more directions for the next word, or sentence, or paragraph. In hindsight, I think I needed to have done another pass on the outline at a more detailed level if I want to get my hourly word count up.

On the plus side, I've hit my chapter goal for this week and I still have this afternoon free. I'm tossing up whether I should make a start on the next chapter or do a more detailed chapter breakdown. :derp: I suspect the more detailed chapter breakdown will win out, because hey, what else is NaNo for if not experimenting with different approaches?

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
584 words in 2 hours today (a non-scheduled writing day) with a more detailed chapter breakdown. This is not helping me go any faster. :cry:

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today

LiterallyATomato posted:

Plot is moving way too fast, isn't working...

McTimmy posted:

Faster, more intense.

As someone who is having the opposite problem and a reader who loves breakneck paced action, I can only agree!

Did another 255 words before logging off last night. I've only got the next 4 hours though so here's hoping for 1k.

EDIT: Got through 490 words before I was interrupted by a meeting, then ground through another 799 to finish off a super long scene. Gonna leave it here and come back tonight, maybe. I've got two more scenes to do before I can close off this chapter.

Leng fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Nov 9, 2020

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
Sanderson has a NaNo pep talk for us all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMeNnX1FGgg

EDIT: Another 1002 tonight in about 2.5 hours. Word count per hour is gradually ticking up. I'm not sure whether this is because I'm over-thinking less, writing too much fluff or something else. :derp: Targeting another 3k tomorrow as a minimum, 4.5k as a stretch. With that, I'll close off Chapter 3 and have made a start on Chapter 4...fingers crossed.

EDIT EDIT: 2081 in 3.5 hours. Chapter 3 is closed off but I'm tapped out so Chapter 4 will need to wait for tomorrow.

Leng fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Nov 10, 2020

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
Agh help I have been staring and staring at the page for Chapter 4 and no words are coming out. Where are you all at?

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
3k into Chapter 4 so I've now passed the 20k mark. Currently undecided as to whether to keep this to normal chapter length of around 6k words or to go shorter.

I won't lie though, the thought of passing 25k is a real motivator. I feel like that'd be a huge morale boost.

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
I am fortunate that I have an entire afternoon to myself today; and unfortunate in that I have already wasted at least 4 hours because of Blank Page Syndrome.

So I am going to try something that has been recommended to me but I've always felt too embarrassed and self-conscious about trying: I am going to switch off the display on my monitors and use a voice to text app to "write" for the next twenty minutes. Hopefully that is going to force me to produce more words faster because I won't be editing every word as I type because I literally won't be able to and if that works then I'll take that as a win.

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today

Devorum posted:

Have you considered writing on a device or app where you can only see the line you're working on? I have an Alphasmart Neo I switch to when I can't get rid of Editor Brain.

I did not know that this was a thing, until you posted this and then NaNoWriMo spammed me with marketing offers for the Freewrite Traveler: https://getfreewrite.com/collections/writing-tools/products/freewrite-traveler

Before blowing $430+shipping on an Indiegogo gadget, I think I'll take your suggestion of fixing things so I can only see the current line I'm writing when I start the next chapter by resizing some browser windows and increasing zoom.

I have noticed that Editor Brain seems to be at its worst whenever I'm starting out a chapter. Once I get going, it's ok, and when I pass the halfway mark in a chapter, I start flying but trying to crack that first sentence and then that first paragraph is just hell. Every critique I've ever read about how important that first line comes to mind and I spend hours typing a few words and then immediately deleting them.

I'm feeling a lot better now though, since I cracked 25k and am now closing in on 30k. Hopefully I will hit 30k tomorrow!

PS: the speech to text did not work for me, mainly because I have a weird accent, though I'm not going to dismiss it entirely because I feel like if I tried to narrate a whole chapter before I wrote it, and then forced myself to transcribe it to text, it might work better. I'll see how I go with that when I get solo writing time later this week.

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
30k!!! Going to reward myself by taking a night off writing and diving into Rhythm of War.

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today

Enchanted Hat posted:

I just passed 40,000, and I'm feelin' good. Less than four digits of trash left to write—let's go!

:same:

Also you were completely right. 40k words and I've only done 7/12 planned chapters, so now I'm giving some serious thought to condensing the rest of those unwritten chapters!

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
I broke 45k!!! If tomorrow is good, then I will hit 50k tomorrow when I finish the next chapter. But I will likely need to write one more chapter after that to properly close off the story.

Still, the end is in sight and feels achievable. YAY!

Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
Amen to that buffer!

I am also "done", at 51k words. There's one more chapter to go to properly wrap up the story, but I did it! First time NaNo win ever, and it feels good!

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Leng
May 13, 2006

One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind


No other road
No other way
No day but today
Hey NaNo folks! If you're missing the creative push to produce from NaNoWriMo, come and sign up for Script Frenzy in April with me! It's the NaNo equivalent for stage/screenplays (or graphic novels, web series, documentaries, radio plays, podcasts, anything that is performed using a script): the goal is to write 100 pages of a script (or multiple scripts totalling 100 pages) in 30 days.

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