Christ Centered Gamer

I can churn out about 800-1,000 in about an hour, without distractions. It might not necessarily be quality work, but it's words on the page.

Of course, with three kids in the house and other things that need to be done (e.g. washing dishes, laundry, feeding the cats), there are plenty of distractions to go around.

Oh, and research. I have to stop and do research now and then. Like look up French words for "food." Yes, it's in my story. The trick to that is to not get too caught up in the "research." TV Tropes and, to a lesser extent, Wikipedia are bad places to look thing up if you want to maintain a workflow.

Although I don't necessarily advocate for the usage of alcohol, it may be a tool to get the wheels flowing. After all, alcohol lowers inhibitions, and maybe it's those mental blocks that need to be overcome before launching into that next great work.

I think its those inhibitions that get a lot of people snagged. My advice is that you don't get caught up in the little details. Don't wrack your brain trying to find the right word every single time before committing it to paper. Just put down any word that comes to mind and don't look back. Don't go back to edit - this temptation will especially hit when you hit the midway mark of your book. Just push forward.

And don't set your expectations too high, either. When you've got your completed manuscript in front of you, don't expect it to be perfect. There will be typos, sentence fragments, and plot holes. There will be scenes that you thought you put in, but had forgotten about and want to shoehorn in there. But you've got a first draft! That's a great first step - a lot of people don't even get that far! In my own experience, the first time I completed NaNoWriMo, the thrill of finishing was a huge confidence booster. I knew I could do it - I proved to myself that I could do it! Now it was a matter of doing it again and again and again until I had something worthwhile to submit to a publisher.

Although I don't necessarily advocate for the usage of alcohol, it may be a tool to get the wheels flowing. After all, alcohol lowers inhibitions, and maybe it's those mental blocks that need to be overcome before launching into that next great work.

As they say... write with alcohol and edit with coffee.

MMM YES SUBSTANCES

Thanks for the tips, Brozilla. I'll try just to keep blasting through remembering this is a first draft.

ChickenSoup wrote:[As they say... write with alcohol and edit with coffee.

MMM YES SUBSTANCES

Haha

Well guys, I was on a roll, and I hate to do this, but alas, I must bow out. My wrist is either badly strained or fractured last weekend and after working with it all day I can barely start my truck. I'm actually quite enamored with the way my story and characters have been evolving on me, so I'm going to keep working on it, but I don't think I have much of a chance.

Orodrist wrote:Well guys, I was on a roll, and I hate to do this, but alas, I must bow out. My wrist is either badly strained or fractured last weekend and after working with it all day I can barely start my truck. I'm actually quite enamored with the way my story and characters have been evolving on me, so I'm going to keep working on it, but I don't think I have much of a chance.

WRITER DOWN!

Rest that wrist and feel better. There will be time to write again later!

(Seriously, dude. If you hurt that wrist, you'll need it better so you can use your weapons, if you need to. Valhalla don't take no sissy boys who whine about their injuries!)

That sucks, man. Let's get your wrist all healed up.

My fifth chapter clocked in at 7,700 words. At the time, that chapter about accounted for a third of my word count.

I'll have to think about how to break it up during my edit, but I'm not sure how. Maybe I'll just leave it as a tremendous, action-packed block of text. (It basically serves as the climax of part 1 of this novel).

DING!

Way to go!

To make up for not participating this year due to personal issues, I went ahead and started writing a new story. Probably not going to be a novella, but still.

Congratz though! I really wish circumstances had been different. November is just a bad month for me, what with holidays and deadlines...

Good job, Brozilla!

Thank you!

Interesting enough, even at 50,000 words, I think I'm only about half done with the novel. I still have a long way to go before this first draft is even finished. So far, this has the makings of my longest book yet.

Now I just have to finish the thing....

Nice!

Congrats man


When I tapped out, I put together a little write up to dissect my feelings and motives on the matter. It's self indulgent and probably a bit egotistical, but I figured I'd share it.



So, I'm tapping out of Nano this year. I've gotten a lot done, and I intend to complete the piece, but at this point I can't push myself to 50k without causing problems elsewhere.

There's quite a few factors at play, external and otherwise. You have the usual suspects showing their faces. I couldn't help work or my ****ed up wrist. I could have used my weekend time better. I don't need to run off fishing or going out for a drink, but there's a part of me that's loathe to commit even a month entirely to one cause. Maybe it's immature lack of self-discipline, maybe it's a healthy enjoyment of actually having a social life.

But it's internally things went a bit awry. I'm not used to long writing stretches. My writing is seldom entirely fictitious, and even the parts that are mostly so are still based in some shade of reality. What happened is simple: I out-wrote my demons. I purged a lot of **** from my system. It's a good feeling, in a way, to have a clear head, but my drive was sapped. What this led to is a refusal to listen.

What I mean by this is that a story is not a dead thing. A story is alive, constantly evolving, shaping your perspective as you put it down on the page. Your characters evolve, you learn things about them beyond what was planned from the start, often beyond what seems rational from the perspective of a story teller. One may start with traits from a familiar person, but shift in uncannily organic ways into something else entirely. But there is a guiding force throughout it all. Bob Dylan, speaking of writing Like a Rolling Stone once said, "It's like a ghost is writing a song like that, it gives you the song and it goes away. You don't know what it means. Except that the ghost picked me to write the song." This is hardly a new concept. Classically it is the muse, in our modern phrasing the subconscious. And its voice is always whispering. This is where I stumbled. As I stretched myself beyond the boundaries of what I knew, I took over. I lacked the patience to wait for the story to lead me where it needed to go. Once I recognized this, the dimensionally lacking writing now just empty words instead of my veins opened on a page, I knew I had to stop, to think and reflect.

I learned a lot over half a month. Any piece of writing is certainly greater than the sum of its parts. There is a magnificent force to them, an absolute power that refuses to bend to man's will. You listen, or it dies. This is why I write. You can paint clothes onto The Last Judgment, perhaps, but even as words words are changed the message remains undying.If you want me to create, give me oak, give me steel, give me words, for these things refuse to bend to the whims of time.