Blogflog - Writing Your First Novel; or Good Luck, all you November Writers

[blogfloggery]

Link: Writing Your First Novel; or Good Luck, all you November Writers
Disclaimer: This blog entry is verbatim, as originally posted on LKH's blog. Copyright belongs to Ma Petite Enterprises.

Comments

[ext_1626743]

Wait, she's only talking about first novels here? Well then HAH I don't have to look at what she says because I've written one and am on my second.

Which is good, because I'm sure no one wants to see me rant yet again about how much I hate wordcount.

[suzycat]

Well this explains a lot. Don't edit, don't research, leave that for later...and then don't do those things.

Actually I can see Lala going back to her research note spots and pasting in giant infodumps, because that's sort of how her 100 per cent gold *cough* does read.

[cryptaknight]

For good or ill, LKH has published a lot of books, and this is probably decent advice (it's not how I do things, even for short stories- I prefer to get the research out of the way after I have a rough idea of the story). It's nice that she's encouraging fledgling writers. But it seems at some point she stopped taking her own advice, or working at writing as much as she did earlier. I doubt that there is less garbage in her "100%" these days; she just doesn't remove as much of it.

[dreamstrifer]

I find it so odd how stuck she is on writing pages as opposed to wordcount. Like, page counts are so arbitrary they're worthless in the grand scheme of things. Every where you look in the professional industry, it's word count.

I guess I can understand thinking pages before the advent of instant word count on computers, but still.

[apep727]

That bothers me as well. Publishing classifications (short story, novel, etc) aren't determined by page count now, and haven't been for years - they go by word count.

It also bothers me that she gets the number of pages per day at those specs wrong - at 12 pt font, double spaced, 1667 words comes out to about 6 pages. It's 3 if you do it single spaced. I should know, because that's how I write, and I've been doing NaNo for five years now.

[ravens_shadow]

This whole section, man: "That’s approximately 1,700 words a day for the month. If you figure about a 12 point font, double spaced, that’s about three to four pages a day for 30 days. If the page is dialogue heavy there may be fewer words, but if it is description heavy then it may be more words per page. Like a lot of things in writing, it depends." She essentially recognizes that page counts aren't an accurate measure for how much has been written, because dialogue usually means fewer words on the page (if it's only dialogue, no tags or description intermixed), while description can mean more. But she still insists on focusing on page counts rather than word counts. I don't get it.

[yaoihuntresse]

Mine will be my attempt to make my own webcomic. I've a new artist so all I need is to get a good page to set up.