Since the official forum is so slow, and often stuff there goes unanswered, and of course, Dopers are more awesome here’s a place for Doper Wrimos to ask for opinions, share cool stuff they wrote, and otherwise get NaNo help that doesn’t warrant its own thread.
I don't really have anything to share, since I'm way behind, but in the interest of encouragement, here's something anyway.
I have a set of twin mercenaries. I decided, this being a story and thus unlikely to permanently scar them, to give them matched names. Thus I have John Alex Bartlett and Alexis Jean Bartlett. And hopefully neither of those means something naughty somewhere.
I’m at ~7400 words. Not a whole lot ahead of schedule, but better than I was at this point last year, when I was starting to come up short.
I’m doing a sequel to the one that I finished, but never got 50k on, last year. It’s fun, but it is difficult to get in the information that’s necessary and covered in the original book, without boring myself or the people who read last year’s attempt.
It’s a superhero story, and I’ve referenced, but not specifically…er…specified one character’s power, because it was just awkward. Until the section that I just wrote, where it was vital.
I think I did it well, but I keep wondering if I should go back and specify it.
Her power - specifically, enhanced vision - ended up making it very hard to justify keeping some information unknown for a while, since…well, she can see things that I need to remain unseen. Thankfully, some of it would require putting facts together, only half of them, she had no ability to locate, or reason to know. I was able to keep the reader in the dark after she figured it all out, due to a quick scene change (yay, large cast!).
I may end up killing off a character I wasn’t intending to, though - I’ve put him in scenes where he’d make some of the stuff awkward…if he were to survive. I don’t want to kill him, but…I think I’m gonna hafta.
My Nano is doing quite well - I’m around 11k, which means that I’m sortof on track to get to 50k by November 21st again. (Night of writing dangerously! San Fran! Hell yeah!!)
And I’m writing a plotline that I expanded out of my last entry into the Doper short fiction contest! (Thank you again, Le Ministre)
Oh, I’m gonna be killing characters - I was always going to kill off at least one in this arc (a legacy character, who I chose his replacement at the very same time I was creating him), and the next arc (the book will hopefully end up divided into thirds) will kill off tons, including a major character, and a couple of my conceptually favourite background characters…I just never intended to kill THIS guy, and that’ll force me to rewrite the transition between the two sections.
Well, I finally started my novel. I chose to not start from the very beginning (although, I know what happens in the first two chapters plot-wise) and instead start from Chapter 3 onwards. I’ve been surprised how easily things are coming to me.
Here’s a question for you guys: How much do you edit your novel as you’re working on it? I ask because as I reread what I’d written, something jumped out at me as making no sense. A quick change of a few details, and I had the problem licked. But I’ve read some guides that say never edit what you’ve done, just keep writing.
I finally started my novel yesterday. I’m only at 2k words so far, I’m hoping to get caught up this weekend.
Oh, by the way, Write or Die has been a life saver for me! It really gets you writing. There’s nothing like the fear of losing all your hard work to motivate you!
For me, that’s touch and go - I can touch what I’ve already written, but then I keep going.
The important thing is to not get dragged down the slipper slope of making more and more changes to what’s already been written, to the point where you’re spending more time on editing than WRITING!
One trick I often use is marking something that I know will need to be changed with a quick [bracket note] in the text - just spending enough time on it that it’ll be clear a month from now. Then I can search for the open bracket character when I’m revising, and see problem spots.
In a cruel twist, all of the books with long wait lists that I reserved from the library from July through September suddenly became available.
There are four of them. Two of them are long (1000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, All Clear) and of course, I will have to reread or at least skim Blackout to catch me up before reading All Clear.
So, um, I’m behind on my word count. Also I haven’t even been able to get ON the NaNo website since signing up.
I’m still working on making my nano story from last year into a full-length novel (it’s currently ~80,000 words and needs another 20,000-30,000 to finish up a gaping hole in the middle) but I decided that going ahead and starting the sequel might lead me to ideas to finish it.
It’s beginning to look like I was right, because I realized through a scene I wrote yesterday that I there was a dangling thread that needed to be tied up to make sense: if there are no non-sentient animals in the afterlife, why is she so sure that she couldn’t cross the kitten (that she used to see if the living could go into the afterlife with her help) over because it was still alive, rather than because it’s an animal?
So I dashed off part of a scene - which doesn’t count for nano given it’s for the other story - that concludes with the unfinished line “I stood by the thin spot in the cellar, dead mouse in hand” which is a kind of morbidly funny mental image. Don’t worry, she’s about to bring the dead mouse back to life.
Anyway, I’m a little over 9,000 words into this year’s nano.
I can’t write descriptions of people to save my flippin’ life. I specifically found one difficult, because it’s thematically important to me that the character be black, though her father is white, and mentioning it just ended up feeling strange…
I managed to catch up, mostly by adding words that were already written. Yes, I’m cheating. I really want to get that story done. I plan on staying up tonight and writing. Hopefully things will come to me.
I slept really, really late today - until 6 PM! - so I’m way behind on the daily quota - though I can get caught up on the total without TOO much effort, because I was so far ahead to begin with. Gotta try to get the daily quota up, though, since I’ve got plans tomorrow, which will keep me from getting that much writing done.
I’m not writing this year because of other commitments; consider me a cheerleader for all of you, though. Go, Team DoperWriter!
Seconding the opinion that editing is for later - the first task is to get the words down. Later on, you can nudge them into being the ‘best’ words…
You’re most welcome - I’ve had a great time running them. I still feel bad that I was too busy/disorganized to get one going for October of this year. Still, everyone seems to be coping.
I’m not officially signed up with NaNoWriMo, but I’m having a go at writing a novel. Unfortunately, I missed two days entirely, as an opportunity to earn money came up that swallowed up my day, and we’ve only got the one computer, it’s having problems, I’m not the only one who needs to use it… I have some obstacles.
However, I DID get three solid of hours of writing in this morning. Haven’t done an official word count since Friday, but I was averaging about 1700 words the days I did write, which would put me at something just over 50k by the end of the month. So… hoping I got caught up today, but mainly I’m using this as an excuse to write regularly, on one focused project, which is a skill I need if I want to actually sell something at some point.
Whoo…had my first 2k day today (total 2287), bringing my cumulative total up to 12847, and my projected end date to the 28th.
Also, this chapter both afforded me the chance to write the sentence ‘I should have said “flung poo”!’ and to write about superpowered loogie-hocking. So, it was fun.
So, how are people doing? It’s awfully quiet here…
I’m a bit past 29,000 words myself. It helps that three of my friends are doing this too, so we’re competing against each other a bit too. And three of us are insanely jealous of the one who hit 50,000 yesterday.
Unfortunately, I’m getting to the point in this where I get bored of working exclusively on one story for more than two weeks in a row, so it’s become a struggle to focus. I’m hoping fresh inspiration hits soon, but I’m afraid that I don’t know much about the villian, and that’s dragging things down.
here’s a place for Doper Wrimos to ask for opinions, share cool stuff they wrote, and otherwise get NaNo help that doesn’t warrant its own thread.