Thursday, November 5, 2009

Random Shots: NaNo Ate My Life

  • Only five days into NaNoWriMo, I'm ready to give up. I'm not going to, but I'm ready to. Heck, I just discovered that Ysharros has effectively stopped writing and I only caught up with her word count last night.

  • I am a slow writer. Writing is fairly difficult for me because I think about every word I'm going to write as I write it. And I self-edit as I go. I can't edit after the fact because reading anything I've written is just as painful as having written it. Actually, I can go back and reread something if at least a month has passed. I need a lot of distance.

  • What I'm trying to say is no, I am not quiting NaNo. What I am doing is announcing my true expectations. I'm never going to write fifty thousand words this month. I'm too deliberate (that's my codeword for plodding) and too self-critical to write with such abandon. Instead, my goal is to still be writing come November 30. If I can write regularly for a month, even if its not 1,667 words a day, I'll be able to see the project through to the end.

  • So that's my goal: don't quit. Of course, I also want to play Torchlight and Champions because I miss them.


© 2009 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
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5 comments:

  1. I wish you the best of luck. I know how much agony I put myself through when trying to write a simple game review, I could imagine trying to do what you are doing.

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  2. Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated (mostly by me).

    I haven't found -- or more correctly made -- the time to write in the last few days, but that doesn't mean I'm giving up. There are 24 days still to go, after all, and I know how fast I can type when I put a burn on. ;)

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  3. Oh, also -- extreme editing as you write isn't healthy (for most writers, anyway). If you want to lessen the tendency, it might be worth doing some pen-and-paper journalling. I do it quite a bit and it's taught me that it's ok to just write stuff and a) not care what you're writing, and b) not re-read it unless you need or want to.

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  4. @ Jayedub - Thanks for the encouragement. I might need you to write a guest post while I'm down. :)

    @ Ysharros (x2) - I'm glad to see you're still in it. I think your word count jumped while I was typing this post. That's how slow I am. :) Thanks for the suggestions.

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  5. I can sympathize with you on the self-editing while writing habit. I've found that the best way to avoid that is to mix hand-writing with typing. If you're using a pen, you'll be focusing so much on trying to keep the ink flowing as fast as your thoughts that you'll not be able to edit at all. Then you can edit when you type up your scribbles.

    I used to do that quite a bit, until I was able to train myself to shutoff my inner-editor temporarily even while typing.

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