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I wrote 500 words two days ago. Then yesterday I was too dizzy to do poo poo so I didn't write. But today is my day off so I'm going to buckle down.
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Nov 10, 2021 20:34
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| # ? Apr 20, 2024 01:44 |
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HIJK posted:I wrote 500 words two days ago. Then yesterday I was too dizzy to do poo poo so I didn't write. Hell yeah, get those words on the page!
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Nov 11, 2021 00:28
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thunderdome winner
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Today I closed off the final scene at the Act I break into II part of the story and it took ~8 hours to write a ~4k behemoth of an emotional scene that caps off two previous scenes that advancing a romantic subplot that I had never planned in the first place. Just  why do these things keep happening.How do folks who normally discovery write stay sane? This story was supposed to be a progression fantasy and now it has morphed into something that very much doesn't feel like progression fantasy and isn't magic school fantasy either but the story doesn't feel big enough to qualify as epic fantasy right now so I'm very much feeling like I've screwed up this whole "write to market" thing.
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Nov 11, 2021 08:56
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Leng posted:How do folks who normally discovery write stay sane? Watching as your characters naturally grow, and respond to the crazy things that you throw at them, is a lot of fun. It's in the edits and revisions you can fine tune things, remove things that just didn't work.
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Nov 11, 2021 18:44
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Leng posted:This story was supposed to be a progression fantasy and now it has morphed into something that very much doesn't feel like progression fantasy and isn't magic school fantasy either but the story doesn't feel big enough to qualify as epic fantasy right now so I'm very much feeling like I've screwed up this whole "write to market" thing. You shouldn’t feel bad about having to go back through later and remove stuff that grew out of control. It’s not fun, but it happens a lot. Whenever I start writing without a plan, things tend to get dark and twisted way too fast. All of my characters become tortured emotionally. I’ll often go back through and remove a lot of words, turning what’s explicit into something more implicit. I don’t know. It feels a little to me like trying to control that urge to spill your deepest, darkest secrets to everyone you meet. Not every person needs to know that stuff. Not every book needs to do everything. And now I’ve officially written more on this today than I have on my NaNo project.
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Nov 11, 2021 21:29
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Leng posted:Today I closed off the final scene at the Act I break into II part of the story and it took ~8 hours to write a ~4k behemoth of an emotional scene that caps off two previous scenes that advancing a romantic subplot that I had never planned in the first place. I wrote my last manuscript draft about a character who overcome some trauma-induced passivity. Then while I was working on my current re-write I realized that it felt wrong that she made all that personal progress just to end up with a man who was so much like how she used to be. So then I used this former romance character as a framing device to show the reader how her development changes over the course of the story, and the story now ends with them parting ways bittersweetly as he finds inspiration to change himself after seeing how she grows. I now have a way more interesting and consistent ending that reflects the protagonist's journey. This is the bonus of discovery writing for me, as if I'd stuck with my old, strict outlines, then maybe I could have had a final draft finished and ready to shop by now, but it would have bothered the hell out of me if I hadn't addressed my qualms with the story as I wrote it by exploring it in different ways. Coquito Ergo Sum fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 02:33
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I hit 20k today! It was a bit of a rough start because I made the mistake of leaving discord open and got sidetracked by chatting with friends, oops. But I still managed to snag ~1600 today and because I bulked up a bit last weekend I'm (a little) ahead of course. I need it to be the weekend again immediately  having to cram 1600 words in at night after a ten hour work day is killer.
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Nov 12, 2021 04:36
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10187 words hahahaHAHAHAHhahah
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Nov 12, 2021 07:06
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That's a lotta words! Good job! I just passed 26k, so that's a relief. Post your muse. My last 2k were written lying on the sofa, with this monstrosity pinning down one arm. 
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Nov 13, 2021 19:54
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Nettle Soup posted:
She's helping 
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Nov 13, 2021 21:15
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Just shy of 45k words  I'm gonna cross 50k soon, I can feel it! (and then...I've got at least another 50k to go to wrap up this story)DropTheAnvil posted:Watching as your characters naturally grow, and respond to the crazy things that you throw at them, is a lot of fun. It's in the edits and revisions you can fine tune things, remove things that just didn't work. Coquito Ergo Sum posted:This is the bonus of discovery writing for me, as if I'd stuck with my old, strict outlines, then maybe I could have had a final draft finished and ready to shop by now, but it would have bothered the hell out of me if I hadn't addressed my qualms with the story as I wrote it by exploring it in different ways. I'm certainly feeling this, because there are scenes and chapters that have turned out really well that I never would have been able to outline my way to in the first place. newts posted:You shouldn’t feel bad about having to go back through later and remove stuff that grew out of control. It’s not fun, but it happens a lot.  Nettle Soup posted:Post your muse. Cute dogs in this thread! I gotta balance this out:  This is the star of my livestreams. He spends most of his time out of frame as pictured, but generally shows up at least once per stream to try and steal my food, get tangled up in my earbuds, block my view of the screen, add unsolicited edits to my scenes and also nibble on me if I'm too slow in giving head/chin scratches. What a royal pain in the backside.
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Nov 14, 2021 01:29
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Nov 14, 2021 11:08
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I'm a good speller. Great. Good speller. But, tie me to a railroad track and ask me how to spell "noticeable" correctly on the first try, and I would likely get it wrong the first time every time. That stupid e.
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Nov 14, 2021 16:26
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rememberered and maintinance , I should get the spell checker to just auto-fix those two.
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Nov 14, 2021 18:26
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I taught myself to spell by finding problem words and pronouncing them phonetically to myself, which really helps until moments where even today, I'll say the word "rest-ow-rant" out loud. In front of people.
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Nov 14, 2021 20:11
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Hit 40K, and pretty happy with my draft that is developing! I have a lot of action scenes I need to iron out in the rewrites, but that can wait for December!
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Nov 16, 2021 16:03
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Passed 25k yesterday and today I'm in a stall. I'm going to try to slam out a couple words this evening, but probably going to just take today as a break from the big Work of it.
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Nov 17, 2021 00:54
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This is my little writing buddy. He grumpily tolerates the sound of me clacking away on a typewriter in the middle of the night. I finished chapter 1 of my rough draft at around 23 pages. Set up a ton of plot hooks, realized I might have too many characters, and took a story about magic knights-in-training and made the protagonist immediately repulsed by violence after killing his first bandit. I feel like the conventional storytelling logic says that I should let him actually get some training in first, THEN have to fight someone and kill them, and then realize the weight of what he's been practicing for. But in a way just immediately diving into "i thought this was a job for the pure of heart, but actually it's really horrible" feels pretty exciting. who knows what direction things will go in? It's pretty fun. I got burnt out so bad doing creative writing in college, I thought it was maybe impossible for me to actually enjoy writing anything. Just the act of finding joy in writing again is really liberating.
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Nov 17, 2021 02:49
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I am writing. I need to total my word count but I am writing.
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Nov 17, 2021 05:23
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13,720 words total. bros...I'm not gonna make it...
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Nov 17, 2021 05:38
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Cross posting this from the fiction writing advice thread for any other planners who are absolutely losing it because you've run out of outlining time and you're being forced to discovery write your way through to the end:SurreptitiousMuffin posted:One of the things I've found with novel writing is that characters are disobedient and outlines rarely hold together when things hit the road BUT also that your best material often comes out of being forced to adapt to something unexpected My latest update: I spent Chapter 9 getting to know character A, got attached, got to the part in my outline where I have to kill off a character next, which was originally supposed to be character B that has appeared on screen but we haven't gotten to know him, then realized that it would work much better if I killed character A because I'd just spent a whole chapter developing his relationship with the POV character and that would be a punch in the gut and also because character A was conveniently situated so that it was much easier to kill him off compared to finding an organic way to get character B in the scene to be killed.  to character A. I feel very bad but somebody had to die to raise the stakes and unfortunately, my discovery writing brain overruled my outline and said it was you.
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Nov 17, 2021 06:29
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That’s the joy of discovery writing lol. I was going to put a romance in mine, then I just wasn’t feeling it so nope! Cutting room floor in real time. (This is not a “reel” time pun but in the spirit of NaNo I’m not changing it, no editing allowed.) I’m still a bit behind, but I have 22.4K words and one completed reader magnet prequel!  It’s real rough lol, my revision guide is a good five pages of notes of things that need to be fixed, cut, or expanded on, but still it’s done!Now onto the next one… Cephas posted:Just the act of finding joy in writing again is really liberating.  HIJK posted:13,720 words total. bros...I'm not gonna make it...
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Nov 17, 2021 08:35
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kaom posted:Isn’t this only over like two days? Serious progress, I’m just glad you’re feeling better! I wrote 5,075 words 27,638 characters today 
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Nov 19, 2021 03:54
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HIJK posted:I wrote 5,075 words 27,638 characters today Heck yeeeeah! You are gonna make it dude!
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Nov 19, 2021 05:17
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My grammar/punctuation checks for my chapters are done. 31K words altogether, now. I also showed my first few chapters on a writing subreddit to motivate myself, and a person with one of those "Hey, I'm a person!" titles under their name read it, and gave me compliments. I won't share the name, but I can turn my head right now and see it on my bookshelf.
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Nov 19, 2021 15:34
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I have spent three days being totally and completely stuck on my second act, with blank outline for my third act. Yesterday after writing some truly horrible horrible words that I don't know what to do with and are very broken, I gave up and started moving all of my world building notes out of my Google Doc and into a Tiddly Wiki so I could actually find things in it. I also spent a bunch of time trying to map my outline using a modified version of this MICE Quotient/Save the Cat template in an effort to troubleshoot where I was going wrong. I ended up with a version that would probably have worked, but it would have turned out to be minimum 100k words and could easily balloon out to 250k words depending on how many plot elements and characters got introduced. Considering that's totally unfeasible for self-publishing and also unachievable by the end of the year, I decided to go the other way and try scaling the story down by shoving the elements I had planned for Act II and Act III into sequels instead. I think I now have an outline of a much smaller, more personal story, that ought to wrap up around 75,000 words, max. I'm at 58.5k words now, and they're roughly split 38.7k book 1 and 19.8k book 2. That means: 1. Relative to the goal of having a completed full novel that's 75k words long: there's roughly 36.3k words to flesh out and finish off the rest of book 1, so I'll need to write something like 4k words/day until the end of November. That's not outside the realms of possibility, as 10 out of the 21 days so far have been 3k+ word days for me, so as long as I have a good idea of what my scenes are, I should be ok. 2. Relative to my original goal of 75k words during November: if I count my book 2 words as well, then I have another 16.5k to do over the remaining 9 days which is a little over 1.8k words per day and very achievable now that I know where I should be going. 3. Relative to the goal of hitting 50k words for one story: 11.3k to go on book 2, which is just under 1.3k words per day. I've only had 1 day (yesterday) where I've been sub 1.3k words for a day of writing so that should be very doable. All of that said, revision is going to be an absolute mess. Oh well, that is a problem for future me. Here's hoping that I don't get stuck again!!!
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Nov 21, 2021 00:19
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I have Done Writing but i'm too tired to collate
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Nov 22, 2021 10:35
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Hit todays goal with 10 minutes left before midnight, between rounds of Spirit Island.  Still on goal every day, but the thing I'm writing atm is a mess, I have no idea how I'm gonna edit it down into something readable.
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Nov 23, 2021 01:01
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Hit 40,000 today, I'm hoping to wrap it up this long weekend 😎
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Nov 23, 2021 02:53
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Hit 50K, another Nano down woop woop!
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Nov 23, 2021 16:44
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Six chapters in and yeah I don't think that I will be doing any challenges anytime soon, unless it's work on one of my main series. That plus the baby meant that I will have to defer this project.
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Nov 25, 2021 09:11
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I’m at a truly shameful 5,000 words. Which is what I expected trying to tackle the parts of my book that I’m totally stuck on for NaNo. Next year I might try this pantsing thing. Congrats to everyone who’s going to finish! And to everyone who accomplished their goals.
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Nov 25, 2021 15:48
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14,000 words to go and it's the 25th aaaaaaaaa. It's fine. I've also only written 2.5 chapters out of 16 or so, so this is going to be a really damned long book.
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Nov 25, 2021 21:28
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PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE!Leng posted:1. Relative to the goal of having a completed full novel that's 75k words long: there's roughly 36.3k words to flesh out and finish off the rest of book 1, so I'll need to write something like 4k words/day until the end of November. That's not outside the realms of possibility, as 10 out of the 21 days so far have been 3k+ word days for me, so as long as I have a good idea of what my scenes are, I should be ok. 1. I have outlined all 9 scenes in the murder mystery arc that I've added which is probably another 18k words, give or take. There's a few other scattered character scenes I need to flesh out, so I'm feeling good on this point - this revised version of the story is definitely manageable in around 75k words. 2. Passed 75k this morning!  3. Annnnd I didn't think to add it up until just now, but I have hit 49k words for just Book 1 alone so gonna hit 50k for it tomorrow. Xalidur posted:I've also only written 2.5 chapters out of 16 or so, so this is going to be a really damned long book. I feel you, my fellow writer with long chapters my first two chapters came in at 14,470 words   I do not know how my chapters end up this long, only that they do and also that shorter chapters feel weird and incomplete to me.
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Nov 27, 2021 02:37
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I hit 50k yesterday 
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Nov 27, 2021 16:18
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Amazing, congrats to those who are finishing already! I’m right down to the wire. I just hit 43k tonight, so I’d better overshoot tomorrow or I’m really going to be racing to the end! I’ve had a single day where I’ve broken 3k so… fingers crossed. I’m also a little worried I might actually wrap this story up inside another 7k. If that happens I guess I’ll just write a goofy “demons don’t know what birthdays are” scene and find a home for it later. (Is this what writing filler episodes for TV feels like???)
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Nov 28, 2021 08:44
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Hit 50k this morning. 13th year running
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Nov 28, 2021 17:36
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That's impressive, good job!
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Nov 28, 2021 17:43
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I was going to write before I started my stream, but then my three year old walked into the room and asked to play, sooooo obviously we spent the next hour or so in the basement fussing with his fishing rod/the erg machine/picking up every dangerous item and being made to put it down instead of writing. Alas. Maybe I won't do much during this stream and will just get to write (deeply unlikely)
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Nov 28, 2021 22:47
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I got roughly 5K and change to go, but considering i wrote nearly 12K in a 24 hour period this week that sounds like absolutely nothing I'm actually really happy with this draft, it's surprisingly my favorite novel i've worked on so far!
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Nov 28, 2021 23:37
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