who's doing NaNoWriMo this year?

[Mysty]

Just wondering, who here is going to participate in NaNoWriMo?

This will be my first year participating as a way to finally kick my butt into gear and write the story i've been mulling over in my mind for months but have never written down execpt for brainstorming notes and plot ideas.

Does anyone have good strategies for caging internal editors for a month? probably my biggest roadblock will be my perfectionist nature continually wanting to go back and fix things (and in reality stifiling progress to a crawl). I really hope the deadline and the word count goal will help force my ideas out of the nebulous realm of the mind and into the reality of my hard drive, but any advice would be nice.

also, does anyone have ideas to prevent research A.D.D. when you're suppose to be achieving high word count? as an example of how A.D.D. i can get... when i decided my main character was going to be a super competent woodcarver, rather than merely looking up tools and techniques I spent a month learning how to whittle and made a 20 piece oak puzzle of a army tank with nothing more than a hack saw and a pocket knife. it was great to learn where the callouses form...but i didn't get any writing done. (if anyone is wondering, the tank is awesome! )

so, newbie looking for last minute strategies on winning NaNoWriMo and turning my dream of being a writer into reality.

[Gamma Fiend]

I have a friend who does this every year and tried getting me to do it a few years back. It's a really cool ideal and sounds like a lot of fun.
It's basically called "writing with reckless abandon". And the advice I was given was "don't get it right, get it written"
Just write, write, write, and write. Think ya have a inconsistency? Keep writing. Want to add more depth to an earlier scene? Don't care. Keep writing. Didn't peg that introduction scene of a favorite character? Why bother asking? Just keep writing.

There's a month designated later on down the line for editing and cleaning up. November is just for reaching that 50k word goal. No matter what.

I might actually go for it this year. I know I have plenty of ideas.

[ProfessionalLurker]

I'm in! It may very well be my seventh consecutive failure, but I'm in!

[Robinski]

Yeah, I'm in, last year was my first. In the end the word count wasn't a great problem for me, because I am SUPER competitive, with myself as well as others (in some circumstances). I entered a Word War, which is an ongoing thing between Glasgow (that's me) and Chicago. That helped me.

 

The other thing that helped me was to break it down. I'm an engineer, so stats and targets are a big part of what I do. 50,000 words in 30 days is 1,667 words per day. Try and get ahead early so you have a bit of a buffer if you lose a day here and there when life decides to intrude.

 

Other than that, as Gamma Fiend says, just write. Whether you're NaNo or not, it's never going to be a polished article, nobody writes their final draft first. Edit at your leisure, but November is not about leisure, it's about graft, hard graft, oh, and fun, lots of fun!!!!!

[Robinski]

Hey, I know that NaNo is set up in geographic regions, but is there a way on their site forum that we Excusers could keep in touch, or easier just to set up a thread here? How about a thread for general NaNo chat and a Support thread for wailing and gnashing of teeth, and moral support when the going gets tough?

[Mysty]

NaNo does have a subforum for Writing Groups and Clubs, So I suppose we could make a Reading Excuses thread over there. But I prefere this forum if for no other reason than you can get an instant email notifications when there is a reply to your thread. five replies to a post i made over there and still no notification.

maybe we can get a NaNo subforum created in the Reading Excuses forum so people not crazy enough to write a novel in a month can ignore our "wailing and gnashing of teeth".

[cjhuitt]

I plan on doing this again, which will be my 6th (I think).

 

Having a plan for how you will write helps, I think.  As does knowing your own tendencies.  If, for example, you know you tend to edit, try setting up your reader to only show you a paragraph or less of already written work. (Scrivener, for instance, has an option in full-screen to keep the cursor centered on the page.  With appropriate zooms, this means about a paragraph showing for me.)  If you then make a deal not to scroll back, that might help.

 

Other strategies that have helped me in the past are going to write-ins, where a bunch of people are spending time doing the same thing.  The peer pressure to add words (and not to edit) can be really helpful to me, especially when I need to do the classic BiC,HoK (Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard) to get going.

 

Last year, I alternated between high-level overviews of a few scenes ahead, and more detailed writing of specific scenes as I went through the month.  That worked well for me, but I also hadn't planned it out as well as past years.  Then again, look where I am at this year (hint: not a lot of planning).

 

As for forums, I actually try to avoid most of them during the month, or at least delay reading as much as I can.  They can end up eating a lot of my time.  It may not be as obvious around here, but I'll go dormant for the month or so here as well.

[Asmodemon]

I’m also joining again this year, for the sixth time. I made it all the way to the 50,000 words in the previous years, so this year I’ve got the personal goal of reaching 100,000 words.

 

My personal strategy is to just plan the hell out of the story so I’ll know what needs to happen in every chapter from beginning to end. That way I’ll just need to sit down and type it all out without losing time halfway through the month deciding where I need the story to go. It also has the added benefit of allowing me to skip chapters if I don’t feel like writing them.

 

I also try to go for 10K days in the weekends – which is something I only started doing in the last two years as I couldn’t write in the first week or two of November and had to catch up (vacations abroad are not conducive to writing time). This time I’m not on vacation and will be starting on the first of November so, in theory, 100K shouldn’t be impossible…we’ll see if I can make it.

[Mandamon]

I'm up in the air this year.  I did NaNo successfully the last two years, but wasn't going to this year.  Then I happened to first, get to a stopping place with current projects and second, already have half an outline complete for a new book, as well as the first 10k words written.  And I seem to have the time available in November to write 1667 words a day.  I think I'll sign up, keep track of my words, and see what happens.  I don't like the extra editing that goes into the aftermath of NaNo, but if I have a good outline, I might be able to get the wordcount per day without too much extra fluff creeping in.

 

As for strategies, I strongly advise having a pretty thorough outline, as well as good character profiles created before you start.  Then you can type without worrying about thinking of what comes next too much.

[Silk]

I'll probably do it again this year (I've done it once before, several years ago--I signed up a few times in the intervening years but never managed to get out of the gate, so to speak). I honestly don't know how invested I am in the idea of NaNoWriMo itself right now, but I plan to be writing a novel anyway and it'll be November, so might as well, right? 

 

Regarding the research question: One strategy I've used (not just during NaNoWriMo; whenever I don't want to lose momentum) is to just leave notes for myself in the manuscript and move onto the next scene/chapter/etc: a brief note about what it is I want to research and what its supposed to do in the scene, and, if necessary, what the scene itself is supposed to do. I usually put these notes in square brackets so they're obviously not prose, and start those notes with the initials TK (these letters almost never come up together, so this makes it easy to search the document for any spots marked TK, rather than scrolling through a novel's worth of pages to find the scenes you need to adjust).

 

If anyone wants to know, my username on the NaNoWriMo forums is Raethe.

[Silk]

NaNo does have a subforum for Writing Groups and Clubs, So I suppose we could make a Reading Excuses thread over there. But I prefere this forum if for no other reason than you can get an instant email notifications when there is a reply to your thread. five replies to a post i made over there and still no notification.

maybe we can get a NaNo subforum created in the Reading Excuses forum so people not crazy enough to write a novel in a month can ignore our "wailing and gnashing of teeth".

 

Just noticed this comment. This is something that'd have to be run past the admins--I have no control over that myself. Of course, there's also nothing wrong with having one or two threads just on the regular forum either.

[Two McMillion]

I will try, and will likely fail. But even so, this will be fun!

[Gamma Fiend]

I will try, and will likely fail. But even so, this will be fun!

upvoted because I have the same exact mentality.

[jag519]

Trying and failing Nano is fun too. Really, getting 30k words is nothing to sneeze at. 

You're getting a big chunk of a novel done, it's about the fun of trying.

 

 

For advise, I agree with the above about word wars. From what I hear of different people doing wordwars, you can do it over all, just who's in the lead for over all wordcount, who's got more daily, or my favorite, having wordwars with someone at a specific time. Sit down with a friend (in person, or on the computer) set a time limit (lets say half an hour), and write, no speaking, just writing the story. When time's up you both stop and say how many words you got done, have a nice break for a bit and then could continue and have another wordwar. haha.

 

My group of friends on G+ would have G+ hangouts dedicated to wordwars, where we'd pretty much just be sitting in a hangout in silence until the writing time is over. haha.

 

 

For your ADD and research, hey, if you have fun doing the research, go for it, but only when you finish the amount of time and words you plan on dedicating for the day. Just like Brandon writes his other books as his leisure time, this could be yours. 

 

 

Also I just feel I should add, these bits of advice are from a NaNoWriMo watcher, I haven't done one yet, next year, assuming I graduate from law school this year, I might. 

[jParker]

I'm doing it as well. So far it's a bit daunting, but have kept up the pace. Hopefully that will continue. (Username's HalParker on NaNoWriMo if anybody wants to add me. Just saying.)

[JustSarah]

I got maybe, the first  7000 words done. (That's what I could save. Plot went in a totally different direction.)

[Gamma Fiend]

yeah.... didn't stay as committed as I said I would. But I did do tons more writing than I normally do and that's what it was all about for me.

I managed roughly ~8000 words. Not total. Just written in general, covering multiple possible stories and random scenes and notes. I know I shouldn't add all that up to one sum... but eh. Whatever. Close enough. I do actually have some story planned and some plot outlines, which this is the most I've ever gotten done. So I'm counting it a victory.