NaNoWriMo Advice (one month late...)

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

December 3, 2009 -- 11:20 p.m.

Yay! My alma mater won the PAC 10! The Rose Bowl awaits! Yay!

Strange, how I can sometimes care about such strange things. Why should it matter which group of slump-shouldered men bangs the other ones into oblivion? I don't know any of them, so I have no personal stake in the game, yet I must cheer... I developed a taste for winning at debate tournaments, and somehow that competitive spirit can transfer to strange things.

***

Of course, I probably should have done this post during NaNoWriMo, but who says you can't use the advice throughout the year?

The write or die app by the appropriately named Dr. Wicked will do annoying things to you if you stop writing and don't fulfill your word count modes. I haven't tried it, but I love their slogan-- "putting the prod back in productivity."

Inkwell offers humorous advisory twitters helping NaNoWriMo writers pad their word counts from famous authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephanie Meyer and Anne Frank. ("Avoid distractions! When I wrote my book, I locked myself in the attic & refused to let any1 in.")

Finally, the NaNoWriMo site asks the proverbial question: "I wrote a Novel, Now What?" You can find the answers here.

It includes snippets of advice from people about revising, including a Scott Westerfield quote that compares meaningful evisceration of a novel vs. the shallow easy changes, which he calls "rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg."

I had no clue that "Water for Elephants" was a NaNoWriMo book! Wow! You can bet the revision/research took longer than a month, though...

My car's been working smoothly since I got it fixed and the demons were exorcised from my laptop. All it took was a little sprinkling of holy water. Huzzah!

0 comments:

Post a Comment