I'm sure it comes up, but how many people here participate in NaNoWriMo? I'm assuming that a few people know about it, so I won't gush about how it works or what's good/bad about it, just curious as to how many people have done it in the past and what they thought. I know it's September but I just remembered it today and thought I'd ask
I've tried it before. Never made it all the way. I don't know, I would like to participate this year. But I have a feeling that I'll have only a fraction of the free time I've had the past couple times I've tried it. Doesn't seem very conducive to me finishing a novelette.
Usually when it gets closer to November, Daniel adds a NaNoWriMo forum. I've tried it, never succeeded, and doubt I'll try it this year.
Really? I've only been in it for one year (2007?) and only just barely won. It's really more about getting the words flowing than having any amount of quality in them =P
That was my problem, I think. I was more concerned with writing something halfway decent, than just vomitting words onto a page. *shrugs*
I'm half tempted to try it this year. It's only 1666 words a day for a month so it's not that hard to do. It might be what I need to keep me motivated working on one piece for an entire month. Getting a first draft done is the hardest part... Most first drafts are crappy anyway, so why not? I'll just have to see where I am in two months, I might be too busy working to have time.
I tried it last year, and it's not for me. I need to be able to go back and make changes when they occur to me. I can't write in "just vomit a stream of words" mode.
I believe it was Ray Bradburry who said that an aspiring young author should write 2,000 words or more a day. Still, it's hard when responsibilities and life come into play... And as far as the negative attitude toward "vomiting a stream of words" writing style, I think many of you are missing the point. It's not to instantly crank out a masterpiece in a month. It's to get you writing. No one, save a very few highly talented individuals, can just write a flawless, perfect piece of work. Editing is crucial to a good story. You don't need to continuously go back over it. When you're finished, you can read it and make corrections as you see fit because you already understand by then how you want the story to flow.
I completed it successfully last year, and I'm not sure if I want to do it again this time. Not that it was so hard, or anything (it wasn't easy, though!), but I'm concentrating on short stories and articles too much right now. I have my Nano badge though, and it feels really good every time I look at it. I may just do it again. 50,000 words doesn't sound like a lot until you try and bang it out in a month...WHEW!
I participated last year. Except I got to 25k words. But then my computer decided to die on me. It would keep freezing and it wouldn't always boot up right. Sometimes it would go good for a couple hours or it would continously crap out every five minutes. So I would be writing trying to get my word count for the day, maybe go over a couple hundred and it would freeze. Nothing I could do. This year is different though. I got a good computer, plenty of ideas and a bunch of spare time. 50k is going to be a piece of cake. Oh! 5 cookies says I will complain to you guys about how its not a piece of cake halfway through november
For what it's worth, I'm 100% BEHIND nano. I think it's very, very bad for any writer that wants to make a proper go of things. I see it as a novelty thing. If you wanna be a writer and do the suggested 2000 words a day, then do it. If you want to be a writer, and want it bad enough, you'll get enough words done in a week to make it viable without some 'competition' making you do it. Yes, the competition is with yourself...but then why do you need this and have to wait till November to make it happen? And isn't the slogan of Nano 'No plot, no problem?' Yes, there is a problem. A big problem. My advice? Take whatever time you need to write the novella you want. Don't go at Nano and a month later have a crap novella and a certificate. I don't intend to take away anyones accomplishments, but if you want to be a writer, you need more motivation then Nano to succeed. I've had too many people strut around like bestseller peacocks because they did Nano. Can you tell I haven't ranted about anything for a while?
I understand that it's not a good exercise by far if you're expecting any sort of quality, but for people who have real problems getting their words out it does provide opportunities to learn how to work themselves. Think of it as an exercise in cleaning out the pipes for people with too much grease built up in their plumbing. I probably won't commit to NaNo, and if I do I'll probably cheat with something I've already got on the boiler and still not have 50k by end of the month anyway - I write on my own schedule. Was just curious 9_9
Oh, I agree that having no plot and how NaNoWriMo could produce a stinking piece of garbage. But I don't see the problem with it if you do have a decent plot to work with that you've been thinking out for a while. And you're right how its silly to only wait till every November to force out so many words a day. If one was motivated enough, they'd be writing non-stop every day, every week, every month, all year.
I would love to succeed at NaNo, but the 2 times I tried I couldn't finish it, and it just made me feel like a big fail. I'm a slow writer--do lots of pondering and mulling over--so that a one-month egg timer is really not helpful. I end up writing 20k words of crap, and it's incomplete. But I think there are definite pros to doing NaNo as have been discussed here. I think if I were to finish it one year it would just naturally be a confidence boost for me. I'll have to stick to my slow-but-steady pace for now. Good luck to those who try it. Also, remember there's the YWP version for teens/kids in which you set your own goal rather than the 50k words.
Marina, being a slow writer is a good thing. It means you are putting time and effort into your work and thinking it over. It takes time to write a novel. Heck, I am pretty sure it takes Dan around a year to get a novel written, at least 6 months. His latest novel he has been working on for a good few months and I think that is now around... 30k somewhere roughly. Working towards a deadline like Nano, in my opinion, is just silly. No one can create a piece in that time frame that I would find a decent read. Isn't the aim of writing a story, to write a story of high quality and present it to an audience and have the audience enjoy it? Well, you can't do that if your aim is just to write this many words in this time and not bother with all the rest that goes along with writing. You have to allow time to go over a piece and look for technical errors. Read the piece and find areas that need fleshing out more, or cutting down on. This process alone should take well over a month if you are really working at it. I don't bother with Nano, mind you, I don't write stories either. Sorry, just my two cents worth on the subject.
I would tend to view NaNoWriMo like most other writing exercises, and as such can see it having value for some. I agree that it would be a bit much to expect that you will have a fully realised piece that is publishable, but I can see some more simple benefits from the exercise - habit-forming, a sense of accomplishment - and there are some people that work better (or at least more enthusiastically) when given conditions to fulfil. Once you get carried away with something, I'd think there's bound to be at the very least some salvagable ideas from the result. All those are the kinds of things that can inspire further motivation, when you've given yourself something to be proud of. It all just depends on how you like to work, I suppose, and whether you, your energy and ideas will be able to thrive under the proposed conditions (as opposed to flailing miserably, as I warrant would be my case - it would inspire more frustration in me than anything else).
I would have to agree about it having value for some as a writing exercise, I just don't see how people can use it as a publishing type credit. It is rather senseless...
Well, the good side of it is that the piece I planned and started work on for NaNoWriMo last year is the writing project I feel is shaping up the best at this point in time. Even though I pretty much scrapped the actual writing I did for NaNo, the prep work and the time I put into hammering at the storyline in my head is paying off nicely. The deadline that REALLY made a difference was the five weeks of planning and research I pushed myself to complete before Nov 1 last year.
I don't think its expected to get anything published from the exercise. Though I can see how someone could get their NaNo published. Nothing is preventing you from going back editing and doing a major overhaul of the story. When your done editing it could be nothing more then a shadow of it's former self. November is just to get it all on paper, December and the other 10 months are for editing. THat is of course if you choose to edit it.
Yeah, that's the theory. But they pitch it like you'll be ready to start submitting after a little touch up if you meet the goal. And that is pretty much bull for most people. You cob together something like that in a month, it's not a matter of a little revision. That's like turning a shack you threw together out of driftwood and scrap lumber into a beach house that will pass inspection and be ready to list with a realtor. It's not just cosmetics, its the underlying structure that won't hold up.
I find Nano to be an exercise as mentioned before. After my first one last year i realized that even though i had reached the word goal, the resulting mass of writing was more like a jumbled up dictionary. While i did enjoy it and it was nice to know that i could write that many words in a month, my own personal feelings of achievement were limited to the fact that i sat down and wrote everyday for a month, and a few more after that. In my own honest opinion though, sitting down to write once a year is quite shocking, you should be able to write without occasion.
Hello, I have been lurking on here for a little while and I have a question I think a lot of you may be able to help me with, so here is my first post. I am registering for a creative writing class in which students are able to design their own curriculum, including the reading list. I am taking this class for 8 credits. I am supposed to write a proposal to the professor outlining my project and give a reading list. I'd like to get this in as soon as possible since the class is filling up. For the past couple years I've been focused on literature of place. What I've decided to do with this class is to take that in a new direction and begin to focus not so much on the positive values of "nature writing", i.e. regional culture, language, customs, etc., as the negative values. By this I mean I want to examine the evolving nature of industrial societies devoid of nature and local color, a homogeneous zone, the anti-place, if you will. Unlike most literature of place, I also want to focus a bit more on the character, and examine the neuroses and pathologies of humans in these sorts of damaged communities. In fiction I tend to fixate on character more than anything else. So this won't be regional writing that celebrates particularity and intact natural communities; it will be writing that observes the spiritual and mental collapse of a society devoid of these things. JG Ballard comes to mind first for me. In most science fiction man conquers setting, but in Ballard it's flipped around. Characters are perverted lunatics, casualties of technology. I've read a lot of Ballard's short stories, but not much of his longer stuff, so I am putting High Rise on my list. I have a couple other ideas for my reading list, but I would be grateful for a few suggestions. Here's what I was thinking of so far. This is very tentative... JG Ballard - High Rise Bret Easton Ellis - American Pyscho Theodore Dreiser - An American Tragedy Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange Sinclair Lewis - Dodsworth Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!