NaNoWriMo 2013

[SugarMeFingers]

Anyone writing a novel this November?
I've signed up for my first try!
I'm doing some planning and outlining at the moment and looking forward to starting.

[elfycat]

Just finished. I had to start writing what might be the sequel but it's all one story so it counts.

[MysteriousHamster]

I just finished yesterday, phew! It was tough at the end there and my story isn't done (I need about another 20-30k in it so my task now is to stay focused and see it through.

Congrats peeps :)

[TunipTheUnconquerable]

Congratulations Elfycat and MysteriousHamster!

[TunipTheUnconquerable]

I think reading through a NaNo draft is always going to be a pretty painful process. If you write your first draft as quickly as possible there are going to be all kinds of things wrong with it at the micro and macro level that will make you cringe, but the point is you now have a first draft that you can fix.

If you're capable of writing slowly and carefully and still getting to the end that's great but for a lot of us, introspection turns out to be fatal and we're better off writing a crappy first draft than risking getting disheartened by stopping and looking at what we're doing.

With my NaNo last year I dumped a whole chunk of it straight off, and there was hardly a sentence that didn't get changed - the voice needed work which meant a lot of very close rewriting. A lot of the dialogue was sound, though, and I surprised myself by finding that the action scenes which didn't come at all naturally to me actually worked pretty well.

I put mine away over Christmas last year and read generic books on the craft of writing, which made a lot more sense to me having got the experience of that draft behind me than they would have done previously. You're not expecting to produce finished or even 'good' work from NaNo, what you are doing is making a massive leap in your writing skills as well as giving yourself a draft to start work on. (Or just having fun )

[TunipTheUnconquerable]

I've become a bit of a creative writing book addict over the past year, but the ones I read between NaNo and my second draft were:

-Writing YA For Dummies (can't remember author)
-Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell
-Writing The Breakout Novel by Donald Maas
-Self-Editing For Fiction Writers by Browne and King

I knew I needed to focus on plotting but actually I also picked up a lot about characterisation (which I thought I already knew about) from the YA book.

[MysteriousHamster]

Nano is always an interesting process for me. I usually dump around 3-5k of useless scenes rightaway. Then when I edit I tend to cut a lot of extraneous words and repetition so more goes then. But whatever I'm left with is still a lot more than I'd do in a normal month, so for me it's worthwhile. Sort of - I always battle with burnout and if you run into a problem during November it's very hard to find the time to fix things properly.

I was doing a 'rebel' nano and carrying on with a previous WIP. I already had 40k on that, and now after some obvious cutting post-nano I have around 83k. I will have a lot of work to do to finish it and get it up to about 100kish.

I wrote a lot details about bears and ships and historical stuff that while revising I will have to do a lot of research about :)

I normally take December off and just sleep/read/eat/drink, then get back to work properly in January.