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Underground > Creation >

Sometimes Quantity Is More Important Than Quality

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14:12 / 05.11.04

9,400 words, by the way: up late last night and on figh-yuh.

16:54 / 05.11.04

Up to about 1500 now, which isn't really good enough, I know. Am horribly afraid I'm going to have to do this *Hemmingway-style,* though the consequences for my liver, sense of general well-being and possibly sanity could well be, um, awkward.

On a more positive note, if you got points for the bodycount in your novel, I'm pretty sure I'd be up there, there or thereabouts...

19:12 / 05.11.04

11k.

PH34R MY L337 WR17Z0R SK33LZ.

Whisky Priestess

18:41 / 06.11.04

For God's sake, Fear, stop making the rest of us feel inadequate ...

Well, I may not have done anything today (although I had budgeted for one day off) but I did come up with an idea for a farce set in a folly on the way back from the supermarket.

22:52 / 06.11.04

10207 currently for me, which is on target. Unfortunately, I am still lacking much of a plot, but at least my characters have now left the house.

23:39 / 06.11.04

Yes, Fear, this isn't 11000 words on the dubious effects that all work and no play can have on your social life, is it ?

14:16 / 07.11.04

13,700 for me thus far, which puts me ahead of schedule - which I need, since I've got a couple of work projects starting over the next week or two that are going to swallow most of my free time.

Having an outline is definitely helping - I'm working off a four-page set of plot notes, ticking off each point as I go. There's a couple of places where the writing is hideously dodgy, but my solution is to simply highlight the sections in question and keep moving forward. Editing is what December is for, after all!

Whisky Priestess

22:09 / 07.11.04

First week gone, and I've broken the 20,000 word barrier before midnight, which gives me the infinite pleasure of revising my next week's total downwards. And also lessens the guilt of having spent all of Saturday indulging in a hangover.

Is anyone else indulging in printing their chapters out as they go and watching the pile grow? I'm even smugly numbering pages. I'm worse than that Jack Fear, I am ...

15:54 / 08.11.04

While I have not yet made it to 9000, I have made a VERY COLORFUL Excel spreadsheet to track my progress and recalculate each day's load based on previous progress.

Whisky Priestess

16:41 / 08.11.04

Ah, clever Dwight. I foolishly used a table in Word and then ran into trouble when I realised I don't own a calculator, except the rubbish one on my phone.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

01:22 / 09.11.04

I'm happy that even with an insanely busy work schedule, I'm making my 2100 words a day goal. Broke the 16,000 barrier today and ended with a nice lead on tomorrow's goal.

The story isn't coming as easy as it did my first year (2002), but I think that's because the first year, I wrote most of it while doing overnight shifts and out of utter frustration.

16:44 / 09.11.04

I'm a bit amazed by those of you who have a storyline of some kind, and find myself wondering whether it has anything to do with your prodigious output. I'm at about 9,500, and back to sweating blood.

18:35 / 09.11.04

Upping your word count is surprisingly easy, once you've got the hang of it. Very little is actually happening, but it is painstakingly described. And my characters are telling each other stories and singing songs and saying poetry and stuff.

18:36 / 09.11.04

And yes, to asnwer the implied question of your above post, the more words you write, the more likely it is that a plot will emerge from those words.

Whisky Priestess

21:52 / 09.11.04

I cheated a little bit by having a plot outline to start with, but I've begun to diverge from and add to it quite heavily, such that every time I finish a chapter I have to go back and rewrite the outline to fit. I've also just had to add two more chapters to the list, making a total of 24. I've just finished my tenth, but it's the shortest one by a mile.

I'm rather afraid that my own doubts about the shaky logic of what I'm writing are providing a certain amount of mental drag. I had a chat with my friend last week and he manage to constructively collapse a lot of the social structure I had posited for the world in which my story's set. I'd been kinda hoping no-one would do that.

So the upshot is, I'm surer of one aspect of the story (it's a dual-narrative jobbie) but less sure of the other. Flimsy, I think, is the word for my reasoning. I am worried that a lot of it may be fluff and filler AND have to be massively rewritten. I am also annoyed by
1) the number of times I find myself reaching for MS Word's thesaurus function (I flatter myself that I barely needed it last time)
2) the fact that I try to use the word "suddenly" every second fucking sentence unless I watch myself.
3) my maddening habit of slipping between tenses, specifically from past to present as soon as I turn my back.

But apart from that, I'm fine. I reached the Nano halfway point today, although I'm nowhere near my private 50% mark.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

03:51 / 10.11.04

I just do it like an old TV series. Creater a bunch of characters, put them in a situation and see hwo they react. If the characters are decent enough, you can get GREAT stuff out of them just interacting with each other.

Of course, having them cross a river filled with zombies is a bonus as well.

12:57 / 10.11.04

Whiskey: having a plot outline isn't a cheat, in fact it seems to be encouraged. Mine is serving as a very good roadmap, although there have been a couple of diversions already.

Just past 20K, which is technically ahead of schedule but a bit worrying. I busted up my knee at the gym last night, so half of today is going to be doctor's visits, and my work schedule for the last week in Nov is looking awfully writing-unfriendly.

Whisky Priestess

15:55 / 10.11.04

I know what you mean. I'm half-delighted that I've got some well-paid temping lined up for tomorrow and Friday, and the possibility of a job starting next week, but I'm also already resenting the inroads it will make into my writing time.

(Says the girl who got up yesterday at 3pm ... hmmm)

Have taken the day "off" to write a short story I thought of last night anyway. I was slightly ahead yesterday but will have to scramble to catch up over the weekend.

Tryphena Absent

16:13 / 10.11.04

Oh my miserable, miserable life. After being stunted for the first week and thinking I was never going to start the first page of a murder mystery came out of nowhere. Problem: I have no plot, no killer, no method of solving the crime. Somehow I think I may manage a second page by the end of the month... perhaps.

I know it involves heavy bruising and that it was pre-meditated. Lend me your brain?

Whisky Priestess

16:41 / 10.11.04

Beaten with a sack of oranges as in The Grifters? Insurance scam gone wrong?

Whisky Priestess

21:46 / 10.11.04

Oh yes oh yes oh yes.

I haven't completed a short story for a year and I wrote a whole one today, didn't even eat till I'd finished (as though that's some sort of validation ...). 5,731 words that won't be counting towards my NaNo total, but fuckit.

23:40 / 10.11.04

"3) my maddening habit of slipping between tenses, specifically from past to present as soon as I turn my back."

I absolutely can NOT afford to worry about tense. It's my very worst, most intolerable habit and if I worry about it I'll come to a crashing halt.

Betty, good luck with the knee.

Whisky Priestess

02:57 / 11.11.04

Yes, sorry, same from me, betty - hope the knee heals fast and clean. I'm sure I meant to say that, but was too busy banging on about me.

09:09 / 12.11.04

I'm going to my first NaNoWriMo meet of the year tomorrow. I am hoping they can give me some plot ideas (or inspire me to find my own), otherwise I will have to steal those zombies.

My word count is about 18,440 currently.

09:10 / 12.11.04

Ach, I'm out. It just wasn't the right time, Illness, work and lack of plot leading to me being severely behind in the first few days. Last time I relied on pints of coffee to drive me on but my system can handle much less caffeine than 2 years ago...
I'm continuing to write my thriller, but at a slower pace and with more planning, with an eye to having something readable by the beginning of 2005.
But keep the flag flying, fellow nanowrimotes! Pour yourself a big glass of Scheherazadeade and write like the possessed!
Whiskey, maybe you could slot your story into your novel, have one of your characters just suddenly start telling it, or find it tattooed on a corpses' back or something.

00:00 / 13.11.04

I'm about 8k behind but not giving up, as I'm starting to reap real benefits from this project. Very happy to have gotten into this, it's made reading a different experience.

16:51 / 17.11.04

Definitely don't give up, Dwight - there's a lot to be gained from the process, even if you don't make the "official" nano goal.

I'm about a paragraph short of 35K, and have noticed a strange shift from early-morning inspiration to late-night writing sessions over the past week, most likely related to the change of seasons. Almost everyone I know locally has given up, which is making me feel a bit out of place, and causing my proud announcements of progress to land like so many flying bricks. Please, reassure me that I'm not the only one still slogging away...

17:35 / 17.11.04

Still on. 29.4k, just a tiny bit behind schedule, and certainly do-able.

Especially now. It's funny; each week has its own flavor, and they say Week 2 is the hardest-- when fatigue and pointlessness kick in the hardest. And my story, as it falls, breaks up roughly into four sections. And section 2 was always going to be the hardest work, involving the most juggling of characters and the most intensive scene-setting. Now that I'm through that, and looking at a swing into the fun parts, it's all getting easy again.

I write at work sometimes--when I can--and in late-night marathons, and I definitely see a difference in my output. Afetr a while, the night-time stuff gets to be like automatic writing--long and loopy and impressionistic--while my daytime stuff tends to be a little more balanced and pithy.

Hang in there, Woo--we're still in the trenches with you.

16:24 / 18.11.04

Yes, hang in there everybody. I'm good and stuck at 22k. Who are these people? Do I even like them? They're getting flatter and more annoying by the word. UGH.

18:06 / 18.11.04

Good advice from our friend Merlin Mann: How to Hack Your Way Out of Writer's Block.

16:29 / 19.11.04

"Add one ritual behavior - Get a glass of water exactly every 20 minutes. Do pushups. Eat a Tootsie Roll every paragraph. Add physical structure.

Write crap - Accept that your first draft will suck, and just go with it. Finish something."

Those are the two that have gotten me this far -- just under 25k. I'm almost halfway there! Behind, and lost, but almost halfway there. A deep hatred for this fucking piece of shit I'm writing has set in. I'm trying to make use of it -- styling myself the Worst Hack Ever. Actually, my Worst Hack voice has a certain mopey style that I find strangely endearing, like a particularly ugly pet.

17:09 / 19.11.04

cut and pasted from the NaNo2001 thread... because, really, the advice never gets old, does it?

Don't be embarrassed. First drafts are supposed to be horrible: that's what they're there for.

Anne LaMott, in her book Bird By Bird, says that drafts are like all those rockets that NASA builds for the express purpose of blowing them up. They were never meant to fly: their only real purpose is to point up the weak spots in the design.

That's hard to accept, and that's what separates real writers from wanna-bes, I think--the idea that there's a tremendous amount of work and re-writing involved. We live in a perfectionist culture, and we fear that every word we write has to be For The Ages.

NaNoWriMo takes you past that. You've got to give yourself permission to write shit, every once in a while. Accept the fact that you're going to produce 50,000 words of pure garbage: the acceptance is tremendously liberating--you've taken all the pressure off yourself to produce work of any quality. All you need to worry about is quantity.

02:51 / 21.11.04

I discovered this too late to join in. Will they have another one next month? I got the impression from the site that this is a once-a-year thing.

14:28 / 21.11.04

The official Nano event is once a year, but there's no reason you couldn't take up the challenge for yourself any other month you like. You could probably even find some people on the Nano forums willing to partner up for a non-November go, if you like the group support aspect.

I hit the 75% mark (37500) on Friday and promptly stalled. Finishing is so close that I've lost the sense of urgency I had early in the month, leading to a stagnant word count nd a lack of motivation.

21:03 / 21.11.04

You were entitled to a break though, BW, and you've still
enough time.

Packing in now would be like going to the pub after twenty-odd miles on the London marathon - short-term relief, but it might haunt you later, whereas if you keep on going, make it through to the end, then you'll be totally within your rights to spend Xmas 2004 sitting round thinking, " I am... Teh bomb, " which I don't suppose is ever an unpleasant feeling.

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