Day 3 – A NaNo Afternoon

 (Buy it at the NaNo Store www.nanowrimo.org )

Phew – today was a long NaNoWriMo session. I left the writing to a more optimum time for me (late afternoon, evening work well) by then my creativity seems to have woken up and I also get a chance to do other things before sitting down at the keyboard.

I started shortly before 4pm with about half an hour of research, I also made some notes today – next to the story map in my notebook. Just on the events (plot) of the next few chapters so that my writing had a concrete direction.

I am not quite a ‘pantster’ – someone who literally flies by the seat of their pants – has no idea what they will write next and doesn’t make a plan beforehand.

Many writers spend the month before NaNoWriMo planning (or even writing – cheats 😉 ) their story. I had a busy month performing and writing poetry, attending workshops and book launches, enjoying the literature festival, running Inkspill and going back to work, I had no time spare to plan a 50,000 word write!

Today was a GOOD day! I did some surfing about yesterday (on the internet – we live pretty far from the coast!) and came across a really good website covering NaNoWriMo from a social network link. I will have to try to find it again tomorrow and hook up a link.

After the amazing Mark Lanegan gig all thoughts of my NaNo write completely left my head and it was a while today before I thought about it at all. When I did think about it, I thought about dialogue.

My narrative voice is fairly fine tuned from my prose poetry but dialogue – that is a struggle – to make it sound natural at least. But as we all know DIALOGUE carries the story along, can move the action forward and is necessary to break up the text of a longer piece of writing.

I decided today I was going to make sure I used dialogue.

I started writing for about half an hour – 40 minutes and to my surprise and delight had managed  1081 words. I felt I needed a break – so unlike yesterday, I allowed myself a break.

45 minutes later I was back on the laptop and spent the best part of another 45 minutes writing, perhaps a little longer. A strange thing happened….

I decided today I would smash the 1667 daily word count as it is Sunday and I could write in short slots. Every time I totalled the word count it would end on a number that was only a few steps away from a pinnacle number, or a round one (ending in 0) – now I do not have an issue with this sort of thing normally, but just like the days of dissertation writing I heard the inner cheer leader –

‘Go on just another few hundred words!’ 

2295 after an hour of writing plus a little more researching.

 

‘See how close it is to 2300? Go On!’

2449

 

‘See how close it is to 2450? I bet you could reach 2500 Go On!’

2646

 

‘See how close it is to 2650? I bet you could reach 2700 Go On!’

at this point my own inner voice replied

 

“Shut UP! I have cooking to do, I’m starving, it’s tea time and I still have a poem to write!”

(Guess I can write dialogue after all!)

TOP TIPS

• Take that break!

• Listen to your own personal inner cheerleader – but don’t be afraid to shut them up when you have had enough!

• Write a few notes before you start the session so you know where the writing is going or what you want to achieve *PLOT ideas or events.

• At the end of the write (when your cheerleader is sulking at being told to shut up!) write a few base notes – leave it hanging – but know already where you are going to start the next day!

• REWARD yourself for being good!

WORD COUNT = 2646

TOTAL WORDS = 6192

WORDS TO GO = 43,808

 

PS A scary fact I picked up from the PAD challenge – we are 10% of our way through the month – by now your Nano should be 5000 words!