and sink in your teeth.
Posted tagged ‘National NOvel Writing Month’
Doing Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) Off the Computer – Writing by hand…errr… paw…
November 8, 2010Blocking Nanowrimo Writer’s Block – Remembering old Soviet Bloc
November 6, 2010
For me, what is hardest about Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is not doing the writing; it’s believing in the writing.
That’s not exactly right. What’s hard to believe is that the writing will add up to something that will go out into the world and be read.
Partly this relates to a certain lack of confidence in my own ability to finish a project to its utmost finished state. Although frankly, I have a fair amount of confidence in this area–I’ve written a few novels which at one point or another I believed to be in their utmost finished state. (The only reason I began unraveling these books was that they didn’t seem to appeal to publishers in that state.)
Which brings me to the source of my true lack of confidence–the increasing awareness of the difficulty in getting projects out so that they are accessible and noticeable in our jam-packed, self-promotional, world.
This end piece (the difficulty in actually doing something with a novel, once written) can make it very difficult to write the novel. Of course, this gloominess is an excuse, but it’s a true hindrance.
What to do about it?
The answers are obvious but worth writing down: put the dispiriting out of your mind. Focus on the endeavor itself. Find satisfaction in the process. And, importantly, remember (always) the possibility of the unexpected; think of the Soviet Union! Who really predicted–at the time– that it would end the way it did?
I’m not sure my inner novelist is very much like Gorbachev (kind of hope not), and I’m not sure it’s positive to be inspired by collapses! But hey, you have to work with what you’ve got. Keep doing it.
Frustrated With Nanowrimo (That is, Myself)
November 3, 2010It’s all a bit frustrating. I’m working on a Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month novel) and I still have only the merest glimmerings of a story.
I have a lot of old plots I could have used. I wanted to be freer.
But the freer one that I seem to be working on (which I can’t detail because it’s too amorphous and silly) is amorphous and silly.
Maybe some of the words will add up to something. I think perhaps the 9000 may be boilable into a reasonable haiku.
Pearl Gets Thoughtful About Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month)
November 3, 2010
Pearl Gets Thoughtful About Nanowrimo
Mid-October? What’s Happened? What’s Coming? National Novel Writing Month!
October 14, 2010
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It is mid-October already. Mid-October!
This means a variety of pleasant and not-so-pleasant things:
1. That, since I can’t remember what in the world I was doing at the beginning of October, I must be getting… (I don’t want to use the o-word or the s-word or the A-word)…. forgetful.
2. Leaves must have already changed in Upstate New York, or even fallen. ( I seem to have some vague memory of red and yellow. Is that where I was a couple of those lost days?)
3. Your last chance for last year’s tax return is about to expire. (Oops!)
4. Didn’t the World Series use to be over by now?
5. I’m not going to say anything about upcoming mid-term elections. (I’d like this to be post to be cheerful.)
6. Nanowrimo–National Novel Writing Month (the month of November) is just around the corner!
Nanowrimo was the conception of Chris Baty, a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, who realized in a brainstorm that the one thing non-professional writers lack that professional writers have is a deadline. He also postulated that the imposition of a deadline (a firm deadline, even if arbitrary) could be an important step to blocking writer’s block, i.e. getting the old fingers/pen/keyboard working. Fast.
Nanowrimo gives would-be writers a very public start date and end date–November 1 to November 30–to write a novel of approximately 175 pages (50,000 words).
The goal (remember you only have a month!) is quantity.
I urge all of you to go to the Nanowrimo website–www.nanowrimo.org–to learn more about this endeavor/torture. All I can say is that if you can commit to it, it’s a lot of fun/torture. There is something wonderful/torturous about writing madly with the virtual company of thousands of other crazed/tortured people, all of you racking your brains and up your word count. (Yes, I too can sense a theme developing.)
I haven’t quite decided how to handle the blog this November. There’s the temptation to post current Nanowrimo output, but I will resist that. If you are writing a novel in a month, you need to be free to be ridiculous. (There’s a limit to how much torture can be borne!)
More soon.
ManicDDaily 
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