No NaNoWrMo This Year But...
For those who are interested, I have a new SSHG story, “Ghostly Visitations”, up on clare009’s KIA Repository. I should warn people that 1) it’s a drabble series - not written as an integrated short story, so if you hate the form, you might want to skip it. 2) I don’t generally get my drabbles betaed. I might want to do so with this monster sometime, but right now it’s in its raw state-proofed by me-but without the careful eye and input of my betas.
Ghostly Visitations - Repository
It’s in a more compact form on the Repository-but I know some people have problems accessing the site, so if you prefer, it can also be read on grangersnape100
Ghostly Visitations - GS100
Oh-so what does this have to do with NaNoWrMo?
Last year I tried National Novel Writing Month and I recommend trying it at least once.
I do believe there’s wisdom to be found in the prescriptions and principles to be found in books on writing by editors, agents, and bestselling authors about craft-even if you want to keep writing a hobby. I think I’ve become a better writer by learning from those sources. I’m just skeptical that any method, any prescription as to process works for everyone. I think you just try everything under the sun and see what works.
I’m not one of those however, that really believes a lack of time has much to do with output. Ever done timed exercises? I once tried a prompt at 15minuteficlets. You get about 500 words if you throw yourself into that. Do that math-you can write 2,000 words in about an hour. And nearly 13,000 people completed novels in one month with NaNoWriMo last year according to their site. Besides which, I’ve been keeping up with zeegrindylows Where Your Treasure Is-a postDH SSHG on FFN, which I find amazing. Fifty chapters and 282,844 words posted since August 3rd-she had been keeping up a pace of a chapter every other day at one point. Long, meaty, engrossing, moving chapters. I asked her what was her secret, and one thing she said resonated with me. That by writing and then posting quickly and feeling she needed to update for her readers, she “outran her fear.”
And I think fear is what is key in writer’s block versus a prolific output.
So one thing I did try for a couple of weeks, was to write a drabble series for grangersnape100 and not miss a day writing and posting until it was completed yesterday. I only started with 200 words each day, then 400. I decided to just let the muse take me where it would, and several twists and turns surprised me as much as any reader. More than that-I tried my first smut in the fandom. My very, very first story EVUH, a Janeway/Tuvok Double Back is actually more explicit than what I wrote in the drabble cluster-but that first story wasn’t just my first but my only NC-17. I felt very uncomfortable with writing smut and after that tread the territory between PG-13 and R.
So, I decided to push myself, and in one day wrote a R - NC-17 love scene of 1,200 words. I can’t say I was comfortable writing it, and especially not in posting it, but I’m glad I tried. Then I went back to around 400 words a day, sometimes longer: 700 words, 1000 words at the end. So, I wind up with 6,400 words of story-in less than two weeks. Even though doing this in drabble form actually made things harder. I would keep going “overbudget” in each segment and would have to go over my words looking for sometimes as many as 30 words to cut in order to hit exactly 100.
What’s my point?
Well, writing the story was almost effortless. NaNo was not. NaNoWriMo requires you to set a pace of 1,667 words a day, and on certain days I could meet or exceed that. But on other days it seemed such a burden, that I found myself crawling at the end, hating every word I wrote, and wound up with maybe 20 thousand words of story-an unfinished postHBP SSHG set in Beauxbatons I’ll probably never post.
There might be a lesson in that-and a happy medium. I know that Djinn keeps telling me that writing really is a muscle-keep using it, it grows stronger-don’t, it atrophies. I never have found outlining very useful-many do. But what I may want to do it make sure I do write *something* every day. Even if it is only 200 words. Some days, having got into the groove, it might be much more than that, but you need to put the butt in chair and the fingers on the keyboard for things to happen.
I’ve written as much as 5,000 words in one day, I know Djinn has written as much as 17,000 in a day. If Bambu345 is out there, she can correct me if I’m wrong, but I know she wrote the 105,413 word DMHG A Quest of Paladins for the dmhgficexchange. I think I remember her saying she wrote it in about two weeks, in spurts of about 10 thousand words. I read somewhere a pro output comes to about 2,000 words a day actually. So some can write very quickly-and it doesn’t have to affect quality. So there’s no reason, I think, to not try to push the pace a bit.
But even if it’s a tiny bit a day-it can add up amazingly fast. Certainly, at the rate I did “Ghostly Visitations”, betas depending, I could update Book of Shadows every two weeks or so. And that would be quite the improvement.
Ghostly Visitations - Repository
It’s in a more compact form on the Repository-but I know some people have problems accessing the site, so if you prefer, it can also be read on grangersnape100
Ghostly Visitations - GS100
Oh-so what does this have to do with NaNoWrMo?
Last year I tried National Novel Writing Month and I recommend trying it at least once.
I do believe there’s wisdom to be found in the prescriptions and principles to be found in books on writing by editors, agents, and bestselling authors about craft-even if you want to keep writing a hobby. I think I’ve become a better writer by learning from those sources. I’m just skeptical that any method, any prescription as to process works for everyone. I think you just try everything under the sun and see what works.
I’m not one of those however, that really believes a lack of time has much to do with output. Ever done timed exercises? I once tried a prompt at 15minuteficlets. You get about 500 words if you throw yourself into that. Do that math-you can write 2,000 words in about an hour. And nearly 13,000 people completed novels in one month with NaNoWriMo last year according to their site. Besides which, I’ve been keeping up with zeegrindylows Where Your Treasure Is-a postDH SSHG on FFN, which I find amazing. Fifty chapters and 282,844 words posted since August 3rd-she had been keeping up a pace of a chapter every other day at one point. Long, meaty, engrossing, moving chapters. I asked her what was her secret, and one thing she said resonated with me. That by writing and then posting quickly and feeling she needed to update for her readers, she “outran her fear.”
And I think fear is what is key in writer’s block versus a prolific output.
So one thing I did try for a couple of weeks, was to write a drabble series for grangersnape100 and not miss a day writing and posting until it was completed yesterday. I only started with 200 words each day, then 400. I decided to just let the muse take me where it would, and several twists and turns surprised me as much as any reader. More than that-I tried my first smut in the fandom. My very, very first story EVUH, a Janeway/Tuvok Double Back is actually more explicit than what I wrote in the drabble cluster-but that first story wasn’t just my first but my only NC-17. I felt very uncomfortable with writing smut and after that tread the territory between PG-13 and R.
So, I decided to push myself, and in one day wrote a R - NC-17 love scene of 1,200 words. I can’t say I was comfortable writing it, and especially not in posting it, but I’m glad I tried. Then I went back to around 400 words a day, sometimes longer: 700 words, 1000 words at the end. So, I wind up with 6,400 words of story-in less than two weeks. Even though doing this in drabble form actually made things harder. I would keep going “overbudget” in each segment and would have to go over my words looking for sometimes as many as 30 words to cut in order to hit exactly 100.
What’s my point?
Well, writing the story was almost effortless. NaNo was not. NaNoWriMo requires you to set a pace of 1,667 words a day, and on certain days I could meet or exceed that. But on other days it seemed such a burden, that I found myself crawling at the end, hating every word I wrote, and wound up with maybe 20 thousand words of story-an unfinished postHBP SSHG set in Beauxbatons I’ll probably never post.
There might be a lesson in that-and a happy medium. I know that Djinn keeps telling me that writing really is a muscle-keep using it, it grows stronger-don’t, it atrophies. I never have found outlining very useful-many do. But what I may want to do it make sure I do write *something* every day. Even if it is only 200 words. Some days, having got into the groove, it might be much more than that, but you need to put the butt in chair and the fingers on the keyboard for things to happen.
I’ve written as much as 5,000 words in one day, I know Djinn has written as much as 17,000 in a day. If Bambu345 is out there, she can correct me if I’m wrong, but I know she wrote the 105,413 word DMHG A Quest of Paladins for the dmhgficexchange. I think I remember her saying she wrote it in about two weeks, in spurts of about 10 thousand words. I read somewhere a pro output comes to about 2,000 words a day actually. So some can write very quickly-and it doesn’t have to affect quality. So there’s no reason, I think, to not try to push the pace a bit.
But even if it’s a tiny bit a day-it can add up amazingly fast. Certainly, at the rate I did “Ghostly Visitations”, betas depending, I could update Book of Shadows every two weeks or so. And that would be quite the improvement.