I signed up and I'm giving it a whirl. I'm doubtful I'll finish, but atleast it gives me a kick to keep writing.
I find it a useful tool - it definitely encourages you to write write write! And I find it rather nice to be able to update my word count and see how the words stack up. What's very nice is that the goal is plain and simple word count - even if what you write is crap, you still win! That's how I felt about it the past two years... I'm hoping to write something slightly less horrible this year...
I decided to bow out this year. I was 1/3 of the way through my novel last year but a a few personal crises knocked me out. I'm still reeling from some stuff so I've decided being competitive (even self-competitive) is not what I need right now. I admire and support all those who are participating though. =)
I'm doing it...it's my first NaNoWriMo anything. My goal is a short story with the minimum 10,000. I have a very irregular schedule and am seeing how much I actually get done in a month of tracking to see if the big one in November is even feasibly possible for me.
@sunsplash Good choice! i did NaNo last year and that was certainly an eye opener having to write 50k in a month! though this time im writing more of And From Black To White and aiming for 60k
I'm doing it too ^.^ I'm aiming for 50k (but cheated a little and started early, I felt like I was in danger of losing interest in my story if I didn't start whilst it was all freshly planned and stuff). So I'll decide on Tuesday what my actual goal will be, it'll be 50k minus whatever I've written by then. I'm only on 4k so far, and don't imagine I'll get that far before the 1st. I decided to try a Mills & Boon romance novel, which has to be 50k. Planned it all and it turned from being a deliberate cheese fest into something I actually quite like the sound of. Trying to keep the sex out of it (I'm used to writing erotica) will be my main issue. Though I think M&B have a more sexy brand too, so maybe I won't try *that* hard. I've done NaNo last 5 years or so, won a couple of times, but I totally failed last November, so I want to do well in Camp. Good luck everyone How much do you guys plan before you start?
@DeviouSquirrel i dont, because im normally using pre-existing stories and writing more. last Novembers NaNo was an exception where i was writing a completely new piece, still didnt plan mind
See, all the years I've tried to write off the cuff, I haven't succeeded and got my word goal. I find it too easy to get lost in wondering 'should this happen? Maybe I should make them go East instead of West... Hmmmm....'
I Suppose it depends on the type of person you are, i cant plan to save my life, but off the cuff i can come up with some (IMHO) really good stuff
as i say, it depends on the person , if you find that you are better planning, stick to it, embrace it. you may surprise yourself one day!
Yup! I'm doing it too. As for the word count, I'm going for quality, not quantity. But at the same time, I've cheated too and am currently at 13K.
I've done NaNo 5 or 6 times and won 4, although last year is a bit of a 'strange' case. That is to say, I wrote 50,000 words (I think actually 51K) but they were in a novel I started a year and a half before hand and I didn't finish it. I just used NaNo as a motivation tool to make progress on this story. By the end of NaNo, my novel was > 100K words, but earlier this year I did a great edit and ended up keeping only ~25K. I have been working on it since (about 6 months) and have just crossed the 75K word count again. I write almost every day (about 5 days a week, minus a couple of days where I am out after work), so I don't really need the motivation anymore. I like the slower pace because I don't just plow forward when I make bad plot decisions, I go back and revisit (I've probably written a number closer to 100K words this year and only kept half). But I'll probably still do it. I'm reaching the point where I get little butterflies of excitement in my belly when I see the NaNo e-mails come in.
I tend to get 50k done in a month anyway, so this is a no brainer, except that this November happens to be the busiest month of the year and I'll have naff all time to spend writing unfortunately - good luck to everyone who enters though!
Just over a month until National Novel Writing Month, Woop woop! Do you guys have any ideas? (not asking for you to share them explicitly) Few Questions: If you are taking part, how are you preparing? Is it against the rules to include text that you wrote before November (perhaps an image or two here and there)? If I submit my novel, will they credit it to me or is there a risk of theft / plagiarism?
All I want is for NaNoWriMo to be fun. So if I do write one this year (still not sure if I have time), then it will probably be about one person or a small group of people who survive a zombie apocalypse. They start to build a zombie fort. As the story continues, their fort expands and becomes increasingly impenetrable (and awesome), which is good because the waves of zombies become more insane. I like it because I already have so many zombie survival ideas from all the years of playing zombie games and fantasizing about surviving the apocalypse. Therefore, preparation probably need not consist of anything other than gathering my thoughts and coming up with a few characters I could hang out with. Yes, it is against the rules to include anything that you do not write in November. I cannot find info about images. By submitting your novel, do you mean verifying the word count? They guarantee that no one reads it.
And if you don't believe 'em, you can scramble it before submitting it to the word counter. The word counting is pretty much on the honor system anyway.
NaNoWriMo never appealed to me enough to tear me away from my ongoing projects and I don't like writing just to push out the word count, but if I had no projects lined up, I might try it as an experiment. What I wonder is, are the stories one ends up with ever turned into a proper novel, or is the result just too rough around the edges?
I think most of the stories are pretty bad. As you said, writing under pressure to suit a word count wouldn't produce great stuff. I know one person who ran out of stuff half way through and then just had the characters wander through the forest for the rest of the book with random things happening.
I figured that might be the case. I guess just finishing something gives a sense of accomplishment, though.
I've read somewhere that "Water for Elephants" was a NaNoWriMo project. Not sure if it's true. I plan on participating but not in the strict sense of the "rules." I need to get to about 60,000 words before November (10,000 words over the next month or so, shouldn't be too hard) and I plan on blitzing to the end of my first novel through NaNoWriMo (120,000 words). It doesn't fit the rules of the contest but I'm not concerned with that. I'm a little excited to finish my first one ever (even if it is just going into a shoebox in my closet).
You are right, and it's not the only one. I found a list of 14 novels that started as a NaNoWriMo projects. Good to know
I might try it again this year as I actually have part of a descent draft for a novel from last year. I actually found my writing to be quite similar to what I usually for a first draft - which is okay and pretty coherent so it was a win/win situation for me. Meaning I could keep to a schedule and get something decent out of it as well. This year I think I might try doing a batch of short stories as I've got a few ideas lined up.
