NaNoWriMo - what's it all about?

[Twine88]

I know roughly the idea behind it, but I wondered if anyone had actually taken part and had any thoughts to share?

My novel is already in excess of the 50k but, is still all over the place and needs much editing.

Any thoughts appreciated, even if you considered it and decided no.

Oh fantastic -I haven't been able to work out how to find a buddy yet but perhaps now I can -

Hope everyone had a fantastic first day!

I was up from around 3am … The result is just over 8k! Doubt I can keep up that momentum, but it's oddly satisfying.

How're you all getting on?

8k!

Bigly its 8k of utter shite obviously

I may have spent an hour writing about Christmas dinners that don't meet up to standard...

Well, that is a very important topic carpet. It's abut time someone had the bravery to take on these controversial subjects!

I’m waiting until the mini-beasts are in bed (circa 7minutes for the eldest) until I start mine- how do you upload to the site? Just copy and paste what you have written?

You don't need to upload. You can just put your work count in at the dash board. To validate your wordcount you copy and past the whole story into a box and it counts it. I don't think you actually need to do this until the end though.

Ah fab! I’m going to need to drop mumsnet for an hour or so aren’t I 😂

I’ve been planning for the last month, was so sure of what I wanted to write, but now I’ve actually started I hate it!

I’m going to keep going and hope it grows on me. 440 so far!

Can you chuck the planning and take it in a different direction Charming? Try some pantsing? I hope you work it out.

I've done 3219 words today and am happy with that. I don't know how much I will get done tomorrow as I have lecturers and meetings all day, so will just have to grab time when I can. I'm hoping I will speed up as I go along.

It’s not the idea I hate, so much as the writing. When I imagine it, there was beautiful prose and it flowed nicely, but so far it just reads like a person muttering to themselves!

I’ve made it to 3,708 and don’t hate it quite so much now I’ve gone back and added in some scene building details.

3080 words done! woop woop and I've signed up to NaNoWriMo but all I've figured out what to do is add todays word count so far!!

Charming its supposed to read like ramblings if not virtually stream of consciousness at times!

I'm glad you're happier with it now though.

How's everyone doing today? I managed to sneak in about 500 words between lectures. Hoping I can get some more done this evening.

Am up to just over 4,000 words but I'm still typing in what I did last year so still cheating! I edited a bit more as I went today and thinking I will have to do more and more of it- as far as I remember it reached the point of barely making sense quite quickly. I used to do 200words a day, which doesn't really build up very fast and which means I forgot what all my characters were doing as it could be weeks before I got back to one of them. At the moment it's relatively rational, though I'd managed to change one of my character's names 400 words in, and had also turned her from a twin into a younger sister by 3000 words.

Annandale - are you the reincarnation of Elinor Brent-Dyer? Sounds like something she would do!

As far as I know I'm not, although I read almost nothing else but the Chalet School for two years aged 11-13 so I probably absorbed her style at a formative age...

I had to rewrite yesterday's. This is very much not in the spirit of NaNo, but I write histfic and I goofed on some facts through being so keen to get going I forgot to read through my Greate Chronologie before I started.
It was worth doing because I had allowed the tone to go off in the wrong direction and it was good to fix that but it means I only added 500 words today.

I think it's fine to rewrite, particularly if it is going to impact on the rest of the story. I have sort of been going back over the last bit I have written every 500 to 1k words and changing or tweaking stuff as I go along. I completely changed the gender of one of my main characters today and it was so worth it. I like it so much more now.

NaNo is very much what you make of it - if you want to rewrite, do it! I can definitely see it helping to ensure you don't get stuck in the middle of the book, with the plot totally running away from you.

I'm on my target so I'm happy out, trying to shut down the inner editor is hard though! Definitely my biggest problem so far.

I also had a spontaneous character develop and clearly I haven't found the right name for her yet, because I keep forgetting it and having to check back in the text

I'm at 6225 words now, which I am really pleased with. I got much more done today than I thought I would. I always think the spontaneous plot and character developments are what make it fun, but than I am a pantser at heart really,
so like a bit of a surprise

That's amazing Bigly, more power to you

I’d like to get to somewhere between 5,000 and 6,666 words today. I’m currrntly in 4,463 so have only written about 700 so far this evening.

I started by going back to the beginning and working my way through adding details, so it’s looking a lot more fleshed out and I’m feeling happier about moving the plot along.

I made it to 6,042! I’m very pleased with that. According to my Stats, I’ll finish on the 17th November, and need to write 1,516 words per day in order to finish on time. This is looking a lot more achieveable than last time I tried (and failed).