@Hunter5024: Mine's a military/spy thriller of sorts, with a bit of "the world might just end" thrown in for good measure. I chose to go away from the usual sci-fi fare that I tend to write just for a change of pace.
Totally forgot this was happening. Really wanted to take part this year. I have a couple of cool idea's for stories that would be great to get written down, even if it is of terrible quality. But I'm really busy at work this month. Man.
Don't not do it! Set yourself a lower goal! Like twenty-thousand words!
I'll give it a shot. The only thing I'm worried about is I'll get too focused on quality and won't get much done.
Yeah I just started and already I'm editing/removing words and stuff. oh well! As long as you at least hit the limit (I doubt I'll hit the limit today as I just started and am pretty tired, but 1100 words isn't bad for like an hour). I think the most important thing is to hit the limit each day at least, then you can go over and fix stuff.
Fuck it, I'm in. I guess it's cheating, but I'm totally gonna just expand on a very short (parable length) piece I banged out after reading a bunch of Kafka. Should be terrible :)
@Chop: That's absolutely not cheating. The point is to write (even if it's poorly) as much as possible. To be disciplined. I am writing some of the worst fiction I've ever conceived, but I'm plowing through with the intent on building some writing-centric habits.
I'll do it when I graduate. November is a shitty month to pick up novel writing. Plus, with my experience (or lack thereof), I'd porobably end up writing a stream of conscience plot that could only result from staring at a blank screen for 5 hours.
Oh man I was so up for this but then all my lecturers decided that November's a great month for handing in assignments. I guess I write a lot in my spare time anyway but man that's such a bummer.
I'll do it when I graduate. November is a shitty month to pick up novel writing. Plus, with my experience (or lack thereof), I'd porobably end up writing a stream of conscience plot that could only result from staring at a blank screen for 5 hours.
The stream of consciousness thing is always what happens. Especially the first time you do it.
Right around the 20K mark things get extremely rough. And that's where refined experience with bullshitting comes in handy.
Huh. You know, I haven't written anything that wasn't designed for my tabletop in a long time. I used to write a couple scripts a year (and start and mothball another six), but that got fueled into writing interactive stories (which is always a bummer, because your friends are never as interested in drama as they are 'winning').
I've been essentially building a futurist slum setting based on some TED talks, I should maybe take the story setup and just turn it from interactive to prose. Probably help me nail down the side characters more. Hem.
This sounds awesome and I'm tempted, but... I'm just too lazy and the 50,000 word count is not helping either. I never wrote a novel before, so even 10,000 words seems too distant for me.
This sounds awesome and I'm tempted, but... I'm just too lazy and the 50,000 word count is not helping either. I never wrote a novel before, so even 10,000 words seems too distant for me.
I got a thousand done in an hour, it SEEMS daunting but really the hardest part will be making up enough story to reach the deadline (I have never wrote a novel either)
This'll be my 4th year doing Nano, and it's just as hard now as it was back when I started. My username there is the same as it is here, Starklight. I've overdone it a little bit so far, I'm up to 5500 or so at the moment.
Just created an account there (Gear Sol), but I don't even know if I'll end up writing anything. I've had a couple of different story concepts bouncing around in my head for a while which I would like to expand on, though, so hopefully I get around to actually writing something.
I'm trying to keep up but November is a busy month.
The fact I'm getting Halo either tomorrow or after that ain't helping either. Loving what I'm writing so far however, it's a new kind of style I haven't tried before.
I'd probably participate in this if I had any sort of writing talent at all. : (
I bet with as much cool anime as you watch you can appreciate a good story, and if you can do that, I bet you wouldn't be too bad at coming up with one yourself regardless of how the prose itself turns out.
@Animasta: Me neither pretty much, but hey we've still got all month.
Alright I'm in. I'm 2023 words in, started yesterday on my phone. It's essentially the idea of 'what will the amazing cyber-digital future look like for people in the third world'. Which is to say, it'll look like life today but without laws.
edit: Oh yeah, my name on that thing is Brodehouse. and now I'm 2593 words in!
double edit: 3345! I stumbled into a character who is sort of like a high functioning autistic, or Asperger's that only concentrates on parkour/city exploration and doing simple tasks; naturally his brother uses him as a mix of a spy and a courier. The character only speaks in such a way as to appease people around him (so he just says "Good!" when asked how he feels about anything), but you can write his thought processes which are tightly specific to his interests. It's fun writing where his brother explains his greater plans with a map and the brother's inner monologue is "the picture was made of smaller pictures. It didn't really matter."
How's everybody holding up? I've been letting myself fall a little bit behind, but only because I know I'll have 3 8 hour night shifts in a row this weekend where I'll have almost nothing to do but type. One thing I've already learned is that I need to work on imbuing my third person narration with more personality between individual characters, so far it feels like I've taken too much of a telling rather than showing approach. But I'm going to stop going back and reading, I need to write damn it.
Oh wow, I forgot about this. I'm planning to just sit down now and write whatever comes to me; I've been needing an excuse to get back into writing.
EDIT: half an hour in and I'm probably going to give up. Everything I think of is too derivative, which is probably why I wrote a lot of fanfic (ick) I'm still going to try and write something, just not in this competition. I'm too much of a quitter to do that :P
Also reminds me of Black Books: "I'm a quitter. I come from a long line of quitters. It's amazing I'm here at all."
@Hunter5024: I'm interested in how people are working this into their schedules. How many words are you writing a day? Do you have a plot outline or doing the stream-of-consciousness thing? In other words, what's your process, man?
I'm in the midst of writing what I hope to be my first novel. Started in January and am nearing the 40K word mark. There are days when working on this thing is like two boulders scraping together inside my brain - I would find if very difficult to knock out 50K words of any coherence in so short a span.
I do all my writing on a typewriter because I can't handle the distractions of a computer. No word count there unfortunately! And I sure as heck don't want to count them manually. But this sounds super interesting. I'll probably try to give it a go next year when I'm a little more prepared and hopefully less busy.
@stryker1121: Well NaNo recommends you do like 1667 every day, but personally I find it easier to just do 3-4000 every couple days. (I also have a job where I can basically just write all night though, so fitting it into my schedule isn't as big of a problem for me as others.) Normally I have a general idea of every major event that will take place in my novel before I even start writing, but for NaNoWriMo I just make stuff up as I go along, only planning out the first couple of chapters before I began. And I spend my off hours thinking of the story I'm writing and what cool things can happen and places they can go to. The trick is not to think about how bad the actual prose is, because once everything is said and done I can change whatever I want to make it better, and then I'll have the benefit of knowing the characters and the world because of how I was forced to delve into them so thoroughly for a month.
I have yet to begin writing anything and really I do not have any ideas of what I am going to write but I will hopefully get there. Should not really be too hard as long as I keep going. :D
Hit my first bout of writers block today when I couldn't figure out how to transition from some bad news in the story back into the adventure. Finally solved it by cutting to a chapter from my villains perspective which added a little intrigue and gave an appropriate break which allowed the mood of the story to shift in a less drastic way. Just one of the tricks I've learned from doing this. What about you guys, having any trouble?
Had quite a bit of trouble after the first couple of pages, since I kept trying to go back and add things. That, and I've gone back to playing PSO2, which has ended up eating a lot of my time, but I plan on writing a lot more today.
The only problems I have been having is just cutting out a chunk of my day to actually do it. That is the only problem I am really having, though I do not know where my story is going at all.
So we are in the home stretch! Going by the word count updates on the site @Starklight was the first to finish, while @Tim_the_Corsair and @JJWeatherman seem to be right on track to finish as well, barring some kind of natural disaster. I'm behind them with 10,000 words to go, but I deliberately planned two days where I would be completely free to write until the deadline so I feel pretty confident in my abilities to bridge the gap, and @Ramone could probably get there as well (with the right kinds of drugs). So everybody, how do you feel about the way your novel turned out? What do you think you learned over the course of the month? Is anybody farther along, and just hasn't been updating their word count? Does anybody plan to do it again next year (whether they passed or failed)?
@Hunter5024: My novel is awwwwful, haha. But it's much better than last year's, so there's that. I've learned that I am in fact capable of sustaining a story for 50,000 words without going off the rails with it, and I'm pretty proud of myself for that. I will certainly be back again next November. :)
@JJWeatherman: I have a feeling after participating in this that most novels start off about as awful as ours, and it's really only through heavy editing that they become brilliant. You've gotta get the initial story down at some point, and it'll never happen if you have to pause every few minutes when you reach a difficult passage. But what do I know, I'm not published.
I am going to fail, sadly. Moving last week threw me way off target, and I'm still recovering from it (with sleep!). Doubt I can make up the words by Friday night.
I am going to fail, sadly. Moving last week threw me way off target, and I'm still recovering from it (with sleep!). Doubt I can make up the words by Friday night.
You could just write "All work and no play makes wemibelec90 a dull boy" over and over again until you hit fifty thousand. How far along did you get?
@JJWeatherman: I have a feeling after participating in this that most novels start off about as awful as ours, and it's really only through heavy editing that they become brilliant. You've gotta get the initial story down at some point, and it'll never happen if you have to pause every few minutes when you reach a difficult passage. But what do I know, I'm not published.
No, I think you're totally right. That's really one of the main goals of NaNoWriMo, is to just get people writing, and not overthinking. That's why I believe December is the unofficial official National Novel Editing Month. :)
Unfortunately I don't think I like my novel enough to want to follow through with editing it, but I just may start something new in December instead. Although, it'll probably be a short story; they're more my thing, I think.
I am going to fail, sadly. Moving last week threw me way off target, and I'm still recovering from it (with sleep!). Doubt I can make up the words by Friday night.
You could just write "All work and no play makes wemibelec90 a dull boy" over and over again until you hit fifty thousand. How far along did you get?
A little over 20,000 words, if I remember correctly. It's still possible, but I'm not sure if I should just go crazy to finish it at all costs or wait until i can write it with some more time so it doesn't turn out as complete crap.
I ended up giving up last week. I wish I hadn't missed those first 2 days, if I had managed to reach they average word count each day I think I would have finished.
oh fuck, i forgot about this, i started earlier this month and have yet to make it to 20, 000, true testimony to my limiting, gargantuan procrastination and forgetful nature. nanowrimo being in november is the equivalent of movie credits. shit you just have zero time for. bathroom break was held off for the entire movie; just adding to the aforementioned "Shit". why is every dark knight rises scene relevant? FUCK.
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