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Re: You're not dense, I'm cryptic

Date: 10 Sep 2003 09:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] epi-lj.livejournal.com
Advice: "Don't do what I did last year."

Well, other than meeting a fellow writer and falling madly in love. That part turned out pretty cool.

But really, it's not as hard as it seems, as long as you actually pay attention to the principles and tenets that they remind you to pay attention to repeatedly. They are:

1. Have fun.
2. It's about quantity, not quality.
3. ??
4. Profit!

Only one or possibly two of those are actually endorsed by the NaNoWriMo people.

I'm very tired. ;)

What I did was to divide up the number of total words that I had to write (50,000) by the number of available days (30ish), to arrive at the magic number of 1,667 words a day. Then I rounded up. Way up. To 2500 words a day. I figured that if I wrote 2500 words a day, then I could suffer to just completely mental block a few days.

After a few days of doing that, I did blank for about two days. Then I figured that I actually preferred to write a chapter a day, and my chapters were usually slightly longer than that. So I stuck to that. I actually ended up hitting about 4,000 words a day for a good bit of it. It ended up taking me fifteen days to complete, if you discount the two days of slack time in the middle.

The key thing to absorb was that it's mostly supposed to be an exercise in overcoming the things that stop you from writing normally, not an exercise in having something publishable at the end. Self-editing and the "someday" concept are huge stumbling blocks for many people, myself included. The whole point is to get yourself to write, and make a mental note, "Well, maybe that could have been better," but then to just leave it be. "I'll get that in editing," and move on. Don't let it stop you from finishing the project. Don't let, "Man, this is terrible. I better stop now and cut my losses," thinking take over.

As long as you bear that in mind and forge ahead, you'll be fine.

I don't know what your local area is like, but the other thing I would say for Toronto people for sure and probably other places is to make full use of the forums and go to all the social gatherings. I didn't get any writing done, but they were fantastic!

Oh, and I disallowed myself from using the internet until I had my word count for the day. That probably helped a little too. ;)

Re: You're not dense, I'm cryptic

Date: 10 Sep 2003 09:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] epi-lj.livejournal.com
I think that that was the theory.

In actuality, we just sat around and talked. A lot.

We almost always finally left when they kicked us out to close the venue. And some of those days we arrived at like 2pm.

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