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Capella
Dark Cat of the Sith
 
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Rochester, NY
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2009-10-03, 16:19

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
That's the greatest strength of NaNoWriMo; it forces you to right. A novel written in such conditions is very rarely going to be good, but at least at the end of thirty days participants have something, which is something they didn't have before.
Amen. I've never actually finished a NaNo (why the hell isn't it in summer?), but every time, I get a huge chunk of something done, and I feel very proud of myself for it, because it provides a base from which to work.

My biggest issue is that I get so caught up in backstory. (I think this stems from doing speculative
fiction.) I'll write something like:

"Cade looked out over the winter landscape. It was the Season of Snows."

Then I'll go "you know, if it's called 'the Season of Snows', why am I using the word winter? He wouldn't think it was a winter landscape, he doesn't know what winter is! I guess I could justify it as a concession to my readers, but couldn't I find a better synonym?"

And then I'll change it to something like:

"Cade looked out over the frozen landscape. It was the Season of Snows."

And then I'll be like "it needs a single-word name for ease of reference. Which god did I assign to snow?" and I'll look in my "Gods" document and I'll find out that I didn't assign a god to snow, but the goddess whose season is winter is called Sehktae and her element is also water so it makes double sense" and then I'll spend time playing around with different words that I can try to derive from her name until I get:

"Cade looked out over the winter landscape. It was Sehlei, the Season of Snows."

It will have taken about an hour to achieve this.

This, my friends, is why NaNo is beautiful. You just crap stuff out, forcing yourself to just do something like "Season of Snows (othername)" and go back and fix it later, after you have a final project. It saves you from getting caught up in thinking and rethinking the minutae.

please tell me someone else works like this

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
Everybody write scary stories for Halloween! I think a month is enough time to assemble and polish a short story, right? It doesn't have to be super amazing, just scary.

Then maybe in November we could have a NaNoWriMo group.
Sounds good to me.

"A blind, deaf, comatose, lobotomy patient could feel my anger!" - Darth Baras
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