We will WRITE and WE MEAN IT (chat thread)

[Breakingchains]

*nod* Many people have never won a Nano for various reasons, but still do it every year. No matter what actually happens with your word count, it usually still ends up being a great exercise.

But I'd ask this: how well do you do under the pressure of a deadline? Part of the whole nano theory is that, because you have to hit such a high volume, you panic--which means you stop worrying about quality and just write freely, which increases your total output, which means you actually have something concrete to work with by the end of the month even if it's kinda crappy. But that outcome depends on whether high pressure motivates you or makes you stop dead. Of course, you can set your own goals and put your own spin on things--you won't "win" the official challenge, but anything goes if it makes you more productive.

(Also, congrats on your first rejection, Squid. x3 Rite of Passage is a good way to put it. Keep going!)

[Deleted]

Yeah... don't listen to me, I've only ever done one NaNo. <_< Note to self, stop trying to sound authoritative on the subject of writing.

I guess what I meant to say was, if you know 50k words in a month is too much for you, I don't see the point in putting yourself through that undue pressure when you could set alternative goals for yourself that, while still challenging, would be more feasible for you to actually accomplish. Trying NaNo and failing to reach that difficult goal seems like it would be more disheartening than trying a smaller goal and meeting it, especially if you already know there's no way you could possibly accomplish NaNo with your current writing stamina. But no, there is nothing stopping you from entering NaNo.

I tried NaNo back in 2011 because a writer friend convinced me to do it so she'd have a NaNo buddy. I finished it, but it was supremely stressful and not something I'd ever want to do again. High pressure doesn't really motivate or stop me--it just stresses me out and makes me not enjoy working, even though I drag myself through the work anyway.

Granted, that was when I wrote the first 2/3 of my novel, but I'd like to get to the point where I don't need 50k-in-a-month challenges to be able to produce long works in a timely fashion.

[Chao]

I guess a lot of it depends on personal NaNo-experiences. When I did my first NaNo in 2009 I just wanted to use it to get a 30k story written. When I had reached the 30k I had contracted the NaNo-virus and wanted to win this thing and go on to 50k. I managed. But what really helped a lot was that I went to the write-in of my local chapter and though I was nervous to no end at the first meeting, it turned out great. The chapter was just forming as a permanent chapter, so we were all nervous NaNo-newbies, but in the end I found people who love writing, who don't judge me for what genre or idea I'm pursuing when writing and who by now I'd trust with the key to my apartment.
So what NaNo can give you, besides words under pressure, is the experience of meeting other writers. Either online or in real-life. Which brings back the fun despite the stress.

@surfersquid, I wish I could reach the point where I'd write a lot without the pressure NaNo (and CampNaNo) provides, but I found that outside of deadlines I tend to procrastinate to no end. So I guess even if it's not NaNo-season I have to make myself think it's NaNo to keep me writing and finishing projects. And who knows, maybe one day I'll be as courageous as you are and try to get an agent interested in my writings.

[Deleted]

Jul 18, 2013 15:06:48 GMT -5 Chao said:

I guess a lot of it depends on personal NaNo-experiences. When I did my first NaNo in 2009 I just wanted to use it to get a 30k story written. When I had reached the 30k I had contracted the NaNo-virus and wanted to win this thing and go on to 50k. I managed. But what really helped a lot was that I went to the write-in of my local chapter and though I was nervous to no end at the first meeting, it turned out great. The chapter was just forming as a permanent chapter, so we were all nervous NaNo-newbies, but in the end I found people who love writing, who don't judge me for what genre or idea I'm pursuing when writing and who by now I'd trust with the key to my apartment.
So what NaNo can give you, besides words under pressure, is the experience of meeting other writers. Either online or in real-life. Which brings back the fun despite the stress.

@surfersquid, I wish I could reach the point where I'd write a lot without the pressure NaNo (and CampNaNo) provides, but I found that outside of deadlines I tend to procrastinate to no end. So I guess even if it's not NaNo-season I have to make myself think it's NaNo to keep me writing and finishing projects. And who knows, maybe one day I'll be as courageous as you are and try to get an agent interested in my writings.

Mm, true, true. I did my NaNo in the middle of a busy school semester and because a friend wouldn't stop pestering me about it, not necessarily because I wanted to. Reaching out and networking with other writers might have helped, too. That's part of why I came back to this forum, in the hopes of doing so and helping myself to grow as a writer.

I'm mostly having a hard time convincing myself to see writing as work, i.e. something I have to sit down and dedicate portions of my day to. I'm used to my working period being taken up by drawing, but lately I've been less interested in art and more interested in writing and it's kind of difficult to make that shift.

I am, however, currently in the process of going over a revision of the manuscript for my friend's and my novel, so that's super fun.

[Sheik]

Hey look I'm actually writing with a vague idea of where I want this to end up at 8D
PROGRESS. YESSSSSSS.

[Deleted]

Jul 20, 2013 18:26:44 GMT -5 Sheik said:

Hey look I'm actually writing with a vague idea of where I want this to end up at 8D
PROGRESS. YESSSSSSS.

Hooray for progress! *high five*

I just sent another manuscript revision to my co-author on the huge post-apocalyptic novel we've been RPing for about three years now, so I'm super excited about that. This first book is looking more and more polished, it's awesome to see it come together so well.

I also began revising a half-finished novel I started back in 2008 because it has some severe POV problems, and I'm hoping to actually finish it sometime soon because I can't stand leaving things unfinished, and I think it still has potential (giant robots = potential, clearly).

Also, I'm thinking about setting a daily word count goal for myself. Nothing I have to adhere to too strictly, but it would at least give me something to work toward more than the vague "work until a meal" schedule I have going on right now. I'm thinking of starting at 1k a day and adjusting that as I see fit.

[Breakingchains]

I keep getting ideas not related to my WIP at all and getting distracted by them. If it's not a random space opera or fantasy trilogy, it's ideas for the crossover fanfiction series I officially trashed two years ago, and then when I look up it's midnight and I haven't gotten anything done.

I've never had this problem before... but I need to just slap myself in the head and get over it, huh.

[Chao]

Breakingchains, I know that problem of ideas invading. Sometimes however it helps to give in to the idea which has been nagging you the most and write down the most vivid scene of it. With me it's always that those ideas are not yet planned out enough to make a full story, so my busy mind rests after I have written down this one nagging scene, and then I can return to my curren WIP.

@surfersquid, your plan of making time to write everyday sounds delightful. With my current WIP exploding in terms of wordcount, I might want to adopt it myself.
If you want, I could share a small excel-file with you where I attempted to emulate the NaNo progress-chart... you type in the number of days the month has and your word count goal for that month and then just as always the current word-count. The graph does not show previous days, but it shows where you are in relation of where you could be with writing the average suggested quota everyday.

[Deleted]

Breakingchains, I have that problem too. Ideas seem to bombard me faster than I can write them. That's one of the reasons why I've decided I need to step up my word count, because projects just aren't getting finished quickly enough and my list of things I want to write just keeps growing. My strategy for dealing with this is to have 3-4 WIPs going at once, so at least if I get really tired of working on one project I can switch to another for a while and give my brain a track change. I also keep a list of ideas that I write down as soon as I get them, usually in less than a paragraph. Then, I tell myself that if I want to start something new, I have to finish something old, and that sort of helps motivate me to work on my WIPs. In the meantime, all of the ideas I've been having don't go to waste, they're just waiting their turn.

Chao, Sure, that sounds helpful. I just have to figure out a monthly quota now... maybe 30k words a month, to go with my original estimate of 1k words a day. I know a lot of novel authors work much faster than that, but I'm really out-of-shape writing-wise and probably need to build up my stamina.

And now it's general writing update time! In spite of my new unofficial quota, I didn't get much writing done yesterday. xD I had somewhere to be in the morning and didn't get back until 5, and by that point I was tired, hungry, and only had the energy to do laundry and help my sister with something. But those take higher priority over writing anyway.

I did write a reply to the post-apoc novel (our tentative title is The Bidelek Trail) which is actually still ongoing as an RP, so I guess that can count... wait... *plugs it in to Word* Whoo, 912 words! I guess I nearly fulfilled my quota, after all! xD It helped that my characters had a runaway conversation again. Good old exploring backstories.

[M is for Morphine]

Jul 21, 2013 12:02:23 GMT -5 @surfersquid said:

Breakingchains, I have that problem too. Ideas seem to bombard me faster than I can write them. That's one of the reasons why I've decided I need to step up my word count, because projects just aren't getting finished quickly enough and my list of things I want to write just keeps growing.

Oh man, this forever. Every time I brainstorm I end up with stuff that can't fit in the story, and so it starts to get a story of it's own. Or I'll have a really tasty idea just smack me out of nowhere. And of course my first drafts are so wretched that the next project always looks better than the one I'm one. XD

[Deleted]

Do you guys ever have times where you get way too into an intense scene you're writing and it makes you all keyed-up and you can't seem to calm down even after you've written it?

I just wrote a decrepit staircase beginning to collapse in some underground urban ruins--with five of the main characters trying to descend it.

How am I going to sleep tonight. xD

I mean, I set things up for my co-author's character to swoop in and save the day, but still. Tension. And also writing about one of my own paranoias involving stairs. My last apartment had some pretty rickety stairs that I was always scared of. These stairs are like a nightmare version of those.

But hey, they say to write what you know, so...

[Chao]

NaNo-Wordcount-Tool.xls (31 KB)
Hope it works as attachment ^^

More than one WIP? I can't do that or I'll not finish anything of more than 3k. Countless Pride&Prejudice Fanfictions bear witness to this. Occassional scenes or short stories to give my muse peace so that we can get back to the real WIP, yes, but nothing more.

[Deleted]

Chao, awesome, thanks!

I'm really proud of myself--I exceeded my quota yesterday and wrote something like 1200 words onto this novel that I hadn't made any progress on in years! I even wrote the fight scene I had been dreading all that time! It helped that Pandora put on some pretty epic music for me, haha.

[Kristykimmy]

Jul 21, 2013 23:50:45 GMT -5 @surfersquid said:

Do you guys ever have times where you get way too into an intense scene you're writing and it makes you all keyed-up and you can't seem to calm down even after you've written it?

I just wrote a decrepit staircase beginning to collapse in some underground urban ruins--with five of the main characters trying to descend it.

How am I going to sleep tonight. xD

I mean, I set things up for my co-author's character to swoop in and save the day, but still. Tension. And also writing about one of my own paranoias involving stairs. My last apartment had some pretty rickety stairs that I was always scared of. These stairs are like a nightmare version of those.

But hey, they say to write what you know, so...

I had a hard time calming down after I killed one of my main characters back in November. And that was after dreading it for days, and crying while I wrote the maybe five hundred words that the scene took. I felt like a horrible person for doing it.

I've killed off plenty of characters before, but despite knowing from the beginning of the story that he had to die (if he didn't die there would have been no plot, the first half of the story was simply to make you care when he died.), I got waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too attached to him. XD;

But, yeah, I can get pretty worked up over climaxes too, and then have a hard time calming down and going to sleep.

[Deleted]

Jul 23, 2013 14:21:20 GMT -5 Kristykimmy said:

I had a hard time calming down after I killed one of my main characters back in November. And that was after dreading it for days, and crying while I wrote the maybe five hundred words that the scene took. I felt like a horrible person for doing it.

I've killed off plenty of characters before, but despite knowing from the beginning of the story that he had to die (if he didn't die there would have been no plot, the first half of the story was simply to make you care when he died.), I got waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too attached to him. XD;

But, yeah, I can get pretty worked up over climaxes too, and then have a hard time calming down and going to sleep.

Killing off a character is always a really emotionally intense experience for me too. Thankfully none of these characters are going to die from this--I did it more for the purpose of convincing the people who live there that they need to leave, because they're about to be told that they're evacuating in three days to ally with a group that they've been fighting against for years. It still got me pretty worked up, though. But my co-author's character came through for the others, so that was awesome. I like giving her chances to be heroic, and I also wanted to show that two of my characters can do some pretty nice stunts, too. And that the other two of my characters are pretty bumbling and incompetent. Well, one of them's six so you can't really expect much from him, but the other guy is just thickheaded.

But yeah, I get really emotionally into what I write sometimes. With this other novel/RP I'm doing, near the beginning, my character was taken hostage by a group of my co-author's characters who also seemingly destroyed her robot friend. I didn't get much sleep at all that night.