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My main character is avoiding his obligations because he can't stop arguing with people in online forums. Write what you know!
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Nov 6, 2023 19:22
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I'm having trouble reading enough to keep my tank full. My writing always becomes false and stilted if I don't read for a while.
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Nov 6, 2023 19:53
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i feel much less alone in my unemployment, thank you all  as for my own story, because i think it's neat: i'm writing a progression fantasy, where the mc is the child of a child prodigy/once-in-a-generation mage who died when the mc was an infant, and whose father basically refused to talk about her. so there's two parallel stories, kinda: the MC's own journey, and learning the story of their mother through other people's stories about her. and the main character then also has to deal with the big expectations of being her child, but ultimately, not being her. so far it's a lot of dialogue with family/family friends, switching between stories, ~magical education~, and reassurance that they'll be loved no matter what path they take. but it's a little light on conflict so far, ngl.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:11
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Gnossiennes posted:i feel much less alone in my unemployment, thank you all My Zen teacher has told me before that family karma is the most powerful and deeply felt in all of our lives, so I think learning the story of your family and finding your place in it Is something a lot of people can identify with and recognize the internal conflicts that come with that. Especially when there are expectations to live up to- It sounds like a great idea to me
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Nov 6, 2023 20:31
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My MC's backstory also has an influential dead parent (what a service dead parents have done for fiction writing), but instead of being considered heroic by the community he's a Martian Q-Anon type conspiracy theorist Who accuses his fellow colonists of being communists tasked with sabotage by the Catholic Church. He dies of stress induced cardiac arrest, but the MC believes it to be assassination and adopts his father's conspiratorial thinking, along with a unhealthy dose of American patriotism despite never living in America or even on earth. This is all set up for him believing in hollow Earth theory andsearching for agartha on the payroll of a wealthy alien friend who believes Lord of the rings is real and wants to discover the cryptozoological elves and dwarves Tea Party Crasher fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Nov 6, 2023 |
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Nov 6, 2023 20:43
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Oops accidentally quoted my own post instead of editing it lol
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Nov 6, 2023 20:43
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Day 6: 2016 Total: 11354 Felt a bit tired when I started tonight, but I feel I got into a groove as I was writing!
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Nov 7, 2023 04:45
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Just 746 words today. I need to use my time better. I've been absolutely awful at it.
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Nov 7, 2023 06:47
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Tea Party Crasher posted:My Zen teacher has told me before that family karma is the most powerful and deeply felt in all of our lives, so I think learning the story of your family and finding your place in it Is something a lot of people can identify with and recognize the internal conflicts that come with that. Especially when there are expectations to live up to- It sounds like a great idea to me thank you, that's a good way to think about it. day 6: 2106 words total: 20,815 words didn't have quite as much time today (got covid/flu shots today! my poor arms), but still finished more than i expected to. also spent a couple hours reading/watching stuff about fighting and writing fight scenes, because i wanted a sparring scene, but my god, i have no idea how fighting works. i'm hoping, with time and practice, that writing them will feel a bit more natural. and now i have a first draft of Act I, now and i'm fairly happy with it, brief sparring scene included.
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Nov 7, 2023 07:41
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Day 7: 1,085 Total: 10,233 our heroes escape town in a cart and argue about whether to kill the driver or not Difficult to schedule writing time around other stuff. Also having trouble working out what the characters can / should be able to do, so think i'm going to do D&D character sheets for them.
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Nov 7, 2023 20:06
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Day 7: 1,085 I've been using a Character Keeper for my writing, and it's pretty handy. It has lots of space to write about your main characters, and smaller sections for all the supporting ones. There's prompts in the back for your characters to help flesh out their motivations, fears, desires and stuff, too.
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Nov 7, 2023 20:17
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7228 words. Today, my heroine explored a farmhouse. Turns out I had no idea what would typically be in a 19th century farmhouse, so a bunch of my time today was quick research trips into Hay Stoves, Dry Sinks, dutch doors, and other fun stuff. Very happy to have an 8 day streak. I used to think that if I hadn't written by a certain time during the day, I'd basically wasted that day. Typically, this meant writing before noon. During this last week, I've written at just about every waking hour. I feel like I'm slowly breaking down the junk and rationalizations that have kept me from producing.
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Nov 7, 2023 22:24
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Finally starting. I had 2390 words before the month started, and tacked on 244 today for a total of 2,634, finishing off a scene I'd had already started that's at the end of the first arc of the story where one of the main characters is thrown into jail, doesn't understand what's going on other than "this is a bad thing", and meets her cellmate. Tomorrow I'll go back to the beginning and actually get the first part down.
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Nov 8, 2023 03:55
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975 words today, I completed a scene. I could try to do more, but I don't have the time, I need to get up early tomorrow. I also don't really have a solid conflict for the next scene. Ironically, now that I've put this one in, the best conflict I can think of is the kinda lame one I just tore out a little while ago. This one might work better because my heroine has tried a better alternative first, so it's okay that it's a less good option. I'll sleep on it.
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Nov 8, 2023 05:34
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Day 7: 1957 Total: 13321 Ended up working on 2 projects for my words today, as I got an idea for a story beat for one of my other fics.
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Nov 8, 2023 05:54
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Okay, this has been very slow going but after two good focus nights I am through chapter 3 edits so let’s check in on how my “cut 25%” goal is shaking out. Chapter 1: was 4,310, now 2,948 Chapter 2: was 6,389, now 4,182 Chapter 3: was 6,069, now 4,555 Phew! Next chapter I have to insert some new conversation topics while removing the boring ones, so I expect that to be slow too. At least it’s not a behemoth needing major cuts though - I’m probably done removing entire scenes for a few chapters.
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Nov 8, 2023 07:06
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Day 8: 1,636 Total: 11,869 Our heroes crash the cart after finding the driver was a cultist, and escape on foot. I am really beginning to enjoy this! I think I wrote 1,100 new words and then went back and edited some stuff from the start which was suffering from multiple retcons. I also now have an excel spreadsheet tracking the names of characters & places, as well as the word count! E: This is also the most I have ever written on any one project, including my creative writing FYP! Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 20:20
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Bobby Deluxe posted:
Congratulations! Habit is hard. My brain was playing some mean tricks on me today. Trying to convince me not to write--that I could catch up tomorrow or the next day. That's a trap I've fallen into too many times in my life. I'm finally learning how to avoid the snares I set for myself. 9 day streak. 1109 words today. 8,260 total.
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Nov 9, 2023 02:12
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Day 8: 2389 Total: 15700 Getting closer to the end of the outline of my story idea, so went and expanded on parts of my story. I got a lot of the words done in short spurts throughout the day.
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Nov 9, 2023 04:52
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day 8: 2415 words total: 23,230 words zero words for yesterday due to post-shots sickness. i took a full-day nap and i feel better now, but whew yesterday sucked also, for people looking for ways to keep track of characters and stuff, i really like using scrivener. i haven't used it before starting on this, but it's been really handy for keeping track of characters and places so far, and outlining/organization in general. I'm just using the free trial, but I'm already set on getting a license.
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Nov 9, 2023 05:49
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9,527 I don't think I like my story very much. I'm having a hard time writing because I don't really care about what happens, but it feels too late to change course
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Nov 9, 2023 09:46
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Tarnop posted:9,527 I'd say it's still very early and excitement about the project is more important that what you've got so far. Can you shift what you've written to be backstory for a new protagonist or new conflict?
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Nov 9, 2023 12:26
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Tarnop posted:9,527 It would be really difficult to switch now if you want to write one continuous story for nanowrimo. But if you're not liking the story, you could start writing something new and do 40,000 words for the new project and still count the 10,000 words from the old story.
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Nov 9, 2023 13:50
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Thank you for the suggestions. I've thought about why I'm not really feeling it and I think it's because my protagonist is looking for someone that she has a connection to that I've left intentionally vague. I hoped to leave myself some space to define this relationship later but it's actually resulted in me finding one of her main motivations kind of hollow. I'm going to try writing some flashback chapters from the pov of this other character to flesh things out a bit Tarnop fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 14:29
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Tarnop posted:Thank you for the suggestions. I've thought about why I'm not really feeling it and I think it's because my protagonist is looking for someone that she has a connection to that I've left intentionally vague. I hoped to leave myself some space to define this relationship later but it's actually resulted in me finding one of her main motivations kind of hollow. That's a smart idea. I chose the story I'm going with because I figured a comedy would allow me some looseness to radically shift into a new paradigm whenever I was getting bored. It sounds like you're taking a creative approach to being stuck so it sounds like you're still going strong
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Nov 9, 2023 18:11
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Tarnop posted:I hoped to leave myself some space to define this relationship later but it's actually resulted in me finding one of her main motivations kind of hollow. I have no idea who these dipshits are or what they're going to do next, but I can't wait to find out!
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Nov 9, 2023 21:15
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Bobby Deluxe posted:For some reason this ended up in the Destiny 2 thread (where weirdly it still kind of worked), but: Deciding in advance what a story is going to be and who the characters are is the number one way to give me writers block. Different people have different processes, and what makes it even more complicated is that people may not even know what process is best suited for them. It seems like Tarnop's attempt to decide the protagonist's motivation "later" is not working out for them. Readers can be enticed by mysteries to want to read more. But it may not be the best idea to make it a mystery what the main character wants, because understanding the main character's motivations is important to making the reader connect with them. Flashback chapters of a different character on their own probably won't solve the issue if it's unclear what the motivations driving the main character are. In fact, the motivations of the viewpoint character should be clear in each and every scene. The reader is being shown this scene for a reason, it's because the viewpoint character wants something from this scene to further their ultimate goal, and something is keeping them from getting it. Without knowing what the viewpoint character wants, the reader will ask "why purpose does this scene serve?"
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Nov 9, 2023 21:57
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Flashback chapters of a different character on their own probably won't solve the issue if it's unclear what the motivations driving the main character are. That did occur to me so I'm going to get to a scene with the two of them together with the minimum of preamble. Which I guess is none! e: I'm not driving completely blind motivation-wise. My main character is so far driven primarily by her need for her family to be safe. She's made a clean break from some bad people, who she was with because of either veiled or explicit threats against her family (this feels like the kind of detail that it's ok to define when the specifics matter). The person she's looking for is the only person she believes she can trust now that her former associates are hunting her down, I just don't currently have much of an idea as to why so I'm just going to feel it out by writing them together before this all kicked off Thanks again for the encouragement Tarnop fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Nov 10, 2023 |
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Nov 10, 2023 02:51
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Day 9: 1,003 Total: 12,872 Our heroes escape through the woods, argue, and make camp. Like getting blood from a stone today. I don't want to leave it this late again, but at least I met my own target, even if it took about 3 hours. My fault for making delicious soup this afternoon.
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Nov 10, 2023 04:31
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Day 9: 150 Total: 2,835 A still spring night. Deep in a forest stood an old castle. Not much done but it was the entirety of the intro scene at least.
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Nov 10, 2023 06:03
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My progress is so consistently mediocre that further updates are only a waste of space.
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Nov 10, 2023 06:53
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day 9: 4827 total words: 28,057 did a lot of outlining and a couple scenes. hell yeah
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Nov 10, 2023 07:09
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Day 11 for me. 1,134 words today which doesn't account for three long paragraphs I axed. 10,353 words total and incredibly surprised that I'm still in it. I typically flag and quit way before this point. My other unfinished novel is sitting at 11,088 words that that took me months to write. Surpassing that in less than 2 weeks will be satisfying.
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Nov 10, 2023 18:48
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Just finished Day 10. Still going strong! Day's work: 1866 words. Total: 18342 words. Feeling more and more assured that the painstaking work I put into the 2nd draft outline was actually worth the effort. The story feels much more cohesive. Currently a bit over half way through the 1st act, so it's going to be a chunky boy, but far short of the 50k. I'll have to first draft some of the 2nd act for the remainder.
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Nov 10, 2023 19:45
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19,000 words--still going well! As I started writing, I realised that the scene I wrote yesterday is way too weird and feels completely out of place in the story, so I'll probably have to scrap it. But I'm still going to keep it in the document for now to beef up my word count!
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Nov 10, 2023 23:56
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I remember back when I used to write for hard drive I would tell people that my process was writing all of my ideas down and throwing away the 90% that didn't work so that I could refine that 10% that I actually liked. We can write as much crap as we want because ultimately we're in control of the percentage of it that other people actually see. Also to my fellow slowpokes, I hope to keep hearing from you. I'm not even over 2000 words yet but I'm going to keep at it everyday while I have my tea
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Nov 11, 2023 00:10
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I've just resolved myself into thinking it'll be terrible, and contradictory, and only 30,000 words because of my joint pain, but it will be done. Someone earlier said about making sure your scenes all have a point they are getting across to the reader, and if you write like that then I am going to admire you from afar because I am writing mine with the intent that nobody is reading it until it's been through at least 2 or 3 redrafts. It'll make sense once it's done and I just have to edit, but the point is I have to get to the end before I can even start to think about making it clever or marketable.
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Nov 11, 2023 00:51
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I think I’ve written like five good words since this thing started 
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Nov 11, 2023 01:49
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Day 9: 2100 Day 10: 2217 Total: 20017 Broke the 20k mark today! My story will definitely need quite a bit of redrafting before I share it with others as well. A few scenes got out of order, and will probably need to scrap some parts, but happy with the ideas I'm coming up with generally.
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Nov 11, 2023 02:31
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Day 10: 149 Total: 13,021 First fail day. MASSIVE rewrite of an earlier chapter, so probably got my 1k in with editing. And if I highlight the section I wrote arguing about demons in mortal bodies, it is about 600 new words. But the overall count has barely moved.
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Nov 11, 2023 03:44
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