and so it begins
I wrote my first line this morning:
“Harmony Miller, that is the most ludicrous thing I ever did hear!”
I had intended to write it last night just after midnight, but I ended up falling asleep well before then. Hopefully writing will keep me awake longer than reading.
Not sure how often I’ll blog about the experience. Writing 2000 words a day will either leave me a) not wanting to write another word, or b) anxious to write something other than bad fiction. We’ll see. Today, a few rules I set for myself:
- No going back. My usual writing style is to edit as I write, but I’ll never get to 50,000 if I do that here. No matter how bad it gets, I’m not changing it. Typos, horrible grammar, characters changing names in mid-chapter, sentences changing in, well, mid-sentence… they’re all in there to stay, or at least until December.
- No one gets to read this draft. Seriously, no one. Not even K will read the whole thing. That can wait for the second draft, as can you. I may post an excerpt here or there if there’s something particularly readable (or laughably unreadable), but that’s it.
- I’m in this for fun, not for grueling work. (I have a perfectly good source of work, thank you.) The minute it starts getting tedious, space monkeys are going to come and widdle on my main characters until that day’s total is finished. It may end up being a story mostly about space monkeys. Stay tuned.
I’m off to write more on the bus. Wish me luck!
Posted by Chris in Fun, NaNoWriMo on November 1st, 2006 Edit this page's grammar and spelling with Emend.
A friend of mine did the novel in a month thing. His advice: just write. Don’t think about it too much and definitely don’t edit. He ended up completing the book in a month. I’m not sure how he liked the finished product, but he definitely liked the process and is doing it again this year.
Good luck to the both of you! :)
I’m aiming at the just-above-1600 words a day. My first line is “My first conscious thought on Saturday morning, October 16th was how incredibly comfortable I was. ”
I’m writing in the first person, but as I was working out a general plot outline today I was visualizing my characters as Jonathan and Jennifer Hart and that helped a lot.
I have to go figure out how to post to my site now.
Trying to put a word count thing in like Chris has. Sigh.
Yes, I didn’t realize that the word count thing would update itself as I went along. As of this post, it’s up to 2420 words. Yay! K wrote an amazing number, something like 3000+ in the first day. I think we know who’s going to win this first…
[...] Aha, you say, but the second rule clearly stated that no one reads this draft, so why worry? But you forget the same thing I did: I’m reading this draft. Even if I tell myself not to, even if I never actually go back to previous days’ work, there’s a part of my mind that remembers all the steaming crap I’ve written, and it asks me every day, “Wouldn’t you rather do something you actually enjoy, rather than write more steaming crap?” And that’s a hard one to answer, so I watch Lost or catch up on podcasts, or do any one of the hundred entertaining timewasters I have at my disposal. Last night K and I watched the first three episodes of the new Doctor Who. (I like them, BTW.) Each time it’s easy for my Inner Editor to make the case for anything but space monkeys, and each time I feel worse afterward for passing up another opportunity to write. I can see how that could spiral into not writing entirely, giving up on bloody WriMo and getting back to my life. [...]