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NaNoWriMo 2012

I was trying to make the love interest talk with the protagonist and have them become friends or something I don't even knoooow. And then instead they launched into a heated debate of privilege and feudalism and the effort of changing things within the system when you're oppressed by it and then switched to gossiping about how the Emperor died (he got killed by a horned and scaled catkirinthing because of SPIRIT JUSTICE) and I'm not quite sure if I approve.

Also none of my characters really have any defined personality traits??? They used to but now it feels like just one gigantic melting pot of words and nnnngh.

Oh well, gotta keep going.
 
so I'm basically where I should have been at the end of day 7, lols. still enjoying my novel though, it's fantastic. the writing isn't great and the characters aren't right yet, but I love this story and this world. It's my baby, basically.

although not a whole lot has actually happened yet. there's been a lot of travelling, some praying, bit of magic and exposition... and there was a bandit attack I guess.

hm.

I don't think a whole lot happens in the novel until the middle really? but you can clearly see that there's something big coming
 
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21,226 words down, and I am very happy so far. I am ahead of my quota, writing around 2500 words a day, and I am, for the first time ever, worried that the final novel will actually exceed the 50,000 words. I'm enjoying it this year!
 
Arg... I'm still at a little under 1,700.

I just can't bring myself to sit down and write when I could be doing other things like, you know, sleeping. I've tried writing by hand, and all I end up with is wasting paper and having sore wrists.

I had a friend read what I'd written so far, and he was really excited and really liked it. But I still can't bring myself to finish it. I need a pep talk or something. I know I can do this, and I really want to push myself for it. Yet, I'm nervous that if I push too hard it's not going to be as good as I know I want it to be. That's why I think this is a harder choice for NaNo, because I actually really really care about what I'm writing instead of brain vomiting words at a incredible pace.
 
Ash said:
I had a friend read what I'd written so far, and he was really excited and really liked it. But I still can't bring myself to finish it. I need a pep talk or something. I know I can do this, and I really want to push myself for it. Yet, I'm nervous that if I push too hard it's not going to be as good as I know I want it to be. That's why I think this is a harder choice for NaNo, because I actually really really care about what I'm writing instead of brain vomiting words at a incredible pace.
Click to expand...

This sounds just like the problem I'm having! The story is so big, grand, and beautiful in my head. I want to have it written, but I don't want to write it, because I'm not writing it well.

But here's what seems to happen for me: unless I try and write it fast for something like NaNo, it doesn't get done at all.

Here's a few other things I've noticed: If I'm writing something, and I get that, "wow, what I'm writing is complete crap," feeling, I tend to freeze up and stop writing. But if you keep writing, I've noticed that eventually the bad writing peters out and I'm actually writing an alright scene, one that halfway lives up to the one in my head, one that I know I can work with and polish later. But had I stopped when I realized I wasn't writing well, I wouldn't have that scene.

I think we just need to write through the crap before we can get to the good stuff. It's hard to ignore that, "hey, what you're writing sucks," feeling, but once you DO ignore it, you can actually write stuff that's better, and then you have something written!

I'm realizing that I need a lot more practice writing scenes. I'm really good at paraphrasing what happens in a chapter or a few chapters or even a scene, but actually writing the scenes is hard. I think it's just something I have to get used to, though; the more scenes I write, even the more scenes I just sketch out, the better I think I'm getting at having a readable scene.

Also! Here are some more pep talks for you! (I don't know if anyone's posted this link already and I'm too lazy to go back and check, but it's the NaNo pep talk archive. Be inspired, people!)
 
Sandstone-Shadow said:
Also! Here are some more pep talks for you! (I don't know if anyone's posted this link already and I'm too lazy to go back and check, but it's the NaNo pep talk archive. Be inspired, people!)
Click to expand...

Holy crap. I so forgot about the pep talks. I read Neil Gaiman's, because he is a favorite writer of mine. I am so at the place he is talking about, since the story I'm writing for is over 56K already and the plot is just about to get really really complicated.

I think I can, I think I can...

Fuck this means I have to find that flippin' flashdrive. Where is it?!
 
Some advice about not being able to write, if you want it: I get that same problem. I come home from school and the last thing I want to do is write, even though I know I need to do 2500 words before I'm happy. Bearing in mind I come home at 4 every evening, I only really start writing at 7ish.

Basically, what I do is just write a paragraph at a time, forcing it out. I constantly update my NaNo word count, just so I can see how close I am to reaching my goal. I also have a notepad next to me, which I write the rough outline of each sub-section of each chapter on, and that helps to keep me in check. There comes a point around 1000 words where it suddenly doesn't feel like a chore anymore and you just sort of explode off, and that's the point you've got to hit - it works with me!
 
I need to crank out 2500 words today to catch up to par; I will do it if it kills me.

Have tried to pick up the habit of powering through even when I have no idea what I'm doing, because eventually I'll find something that makes sense and then I can go back and edit the chapter to make it more coherent.
(I know, I know, no editting during NaNo, but it always brings my total wordcount up because I rarely actually remove anything, and these chapters are intended to be released on a weekly basis.)

That, and bribing myself with being allowed to work on either a digimon design or a fake pokemon design for every so many words I complete. Cheaper than chocolate and keeps my brain from stagnating in writing mode!
 
longish post because I have a lot to get off my chest; you can probably safely ignore the first few paragraphs if you're tired of reading about Kratos's Writing Neuroses™ and/or don't care about his Patently Terrible Story Idea™, but I did also want to share a few things that have helped me so the last bits might be interesting! Or something! Here, I will even be a gentleman and hidetag the different parts so you can easily skip the ones that will likely bore you to tears.

soooo I accidentally didn't write anything for like a week, whoops! Well, okay, not entirely accidentally—I got to a point where, even though I do still want to write my original idea, I really wanted to do something with one of the more traditionally novelly ones. So I made myself sit down and try to figure out just enough worldbuilding and basic plot to feel like I'd be comfortable working on it, which ended up taking six days and really only started to give me super-cool ideas/fix problems I was wasting time panicking about over the last two. I'd meant to take only a day or so's break from writing in general so I could devote my attention to that, but when I noticed it was taking longer I really should have kept adding at least a little to the other story while I was thinking and now I'm still ~6000 words behind and that was a mistake! Kinda sorta worth it a little, though, as I do feel like I have some hella awesome things to do with this other story at long last! And while there is obviously a lot of worldbuilding left to do and the plot still has issues (though for once it actually has most of a middle omg it's a miracle ;-;) and I wouldn't be surprised if things do change entirely at some point in the future, I have enough of an initial direction that I think I'm in a place where I would actually be comfortable with and have fun while writing this! (And it hardly makes you a grinch to feel like you're actually okay with what you're starting, contrary to what certain impolite people may have suggested. Honestly. >|)

Technically I am now working on both stories, though the brunt of my attention is on the newer one; after I catch up I may try for 2500-ish words a day myself, about 2000 for the main one and 500 for the other one? I don't know, we'll see!

The new story is still fanfic (;-;) but this time it's Pokémon instead of a half-dead fandom so more people will actually care if I finish it, haha. Basically it's an attempt to play around with semi-traditional high-fantasy-esque worldbuilding, but with pokémon. So, like, there are elves and dwarves and orcs and swords and a predominantly lazy medieval setting... but also pokémon! Which is marginally less stupid than it sounds! I'm trying to think of interesting ways to integrate the two concepts so that they do feel like they belong together almost seamlessly, for example the way "magic" works and how the magic and the presence of pokémon would affect their cultures and interactions and so on (as opposed to "it's The Hobbit, but Smaug is a charizard aaaand that is practically the only difference!"). It is probably still ultimately very stupid! but it's fun stupid and nice worldbuildy practice and that's all that matters in the end! Right? Right?

There are kind of a lot of different thingies going on at once (I feel like I'm writing a Pokémon A Song of Ice and Fire, except that is probably a bad comparison since I haven't actually read those or seen more than two episodes of the show?) so parts of it are a little hard to describe without either confusing people/myself or spoilers, but the main thing is that this one probably-delusional dwarf king wants to kill all the humans because he says God told him to (the humans apparently don't originally come from this world and just got bamfed there out of the blue one day because wizards or legendaries or something idk). The humans do not want to die, understandably, but even after having been there for at least a few hundred years they are still hella outnumbered by all the elves/dwarves/orcs (Arilkin, collectively) who were there first, and just the few countries that are actively antagonizing them could easily stomp them flat. Also they can't use magic like the Arilkin! One option is asking some of the more powerful Arilkin lords for help, including the God-Kings who have the crazy strength and magic powers of big scary legendaries like rayquaza and dialga and stuff. But while the God-Kings don't quite want to wipe them out they do pretty much take advantage of the humans all the time, and the political/economic repercussions of asking some of them will likely make that worse. There is another option that involves a way that humans can use magic similar to the Arilkin's, but it's pretty morally dubious and most of the human rulers don't feel like selling their souls just yet!

The main-main characters (a human prince and the half-elf court mage type person except she actually sucks at magic oops) are doing what they can to find help for their kingdom—hopefully sympathetic help but they'll take becoming a protectorate or something if they absolutely must—although since the prince is a lazy bum and the half-elf loses her temper too easily they are objectively terrible at this task! Meanwhile there're weird family power struggles going on with the bad guys, some of the other humans are finally caving in to the temptation to try the morally-dubious magic on a large scale (since it would both help against King Delusional and, should they survive, give them enough power to level the playing field with the remaining Arilkin), and there are crazy love triangles and political intrigue/deception I hope to god I can pull off well and an adorable natu which is like the most important part.

Aaand yeah! A lot of it's actually fairly generic, or at least it seems that way to me right now, but the plot is really just an excuse to play with the world anyway so it's cool.

As for motivation/inspiration/time-related thingies, here are some things that have helped me in the past, with two quick disclaimers: first, they don't all necessarily work well for the same project at the same time (and obviously not every trick is going to work for everyone in the first place, blah blah blah), but have managed to do something useful for me at some point and so they're worth a shot; and second, I have not yet actually tried some of these explicitly for NaNo, or at least not this year's NaNo, but they've helped with past NaNos or with other projects and I expect that they'll be of some use to me this month as well.

1. Write as much as you can, as fast as you can for an hour (or some other period of time, but in years past I've found an hour to be a pretty good baseline), without stopping if you can help it, and when the timer goes off see how many words you were able to crank out. Most people seem to be able to get 1600 words or more in one straight hour of typing—I think I can get around 2000 if I really concentrate—and sometimes just knowing that is enough to help get you through the writing for a while. It doesn't seem so bad or so time-consuming if you know that you can bang out the daily minimum or more in just one hour out of a whole twenty-four!

2. Let yourself take breaks if you need it. Maybe not six-day breaks like mine oops, but if you're really so horribly blocked that you can't even force terse crap onto the page, it may in fact be best to shift gears for a little while. Get away from the computer and go for a walk. If you're working on more than one story (whether or not more than one is for NaNo), try writing the other story/project for a while and see if that comes more easily. If you don't want to put too much distance between yourself and your current NaNo plans (though really, letting go for an hour or two does often help), you can do what I'll likely be doing and spend that time doing other story-related work instead. I may have enough worldbuilding and plotting to get me started, but there's still a lot more research and planning I need to do anyway for the final product. If I work on that during some of my writing breaks, I'm still ultimately contributing to moving my story forward even though I'm not actively vomiting irredeemable garbage "prose" into the story itself... and working on the worldbuilding/research will likely give me ideas that will help me get the story back on track, too! Just don't get so absorbed in your break/other work that you do end up spending six days getting nothing done, because that is bad. I mean, you can absolutely catch up—I fell much further behind than this in 2008 and still managed to pull off a win in the end—but you should still try to write at least a little bit every day! As some of the recent pep talks I've seen have said, even if you're only writing a sentence a day, you're still moving forward!

3. On that note, maybe try the best of both points 1 and 2! There is a mind hack/productivity technique called the "Magic Work Cycle", which in a nutshell is working without interruption for a set period (usually half an hour), then "playing" or doing something else for a half hour, then working for a half hour, so on and so forth. There is a nifty website/app thing here that will time it for you (and you can adjust the time if you don't want to do the usual 30 min/30 min), but even a kitchen timer or alarm or something will do. The idea is that you're more likely to get a lot of good work done during that half hour if you have the promise of an equally-lengthy break at the end of it, and breaking the hard work into half-hour chunks makes it seem more manageable in general. When I've used this for school projects and the like, though, I haven't even really thought of it as "just five more minutes and I can stop for half an hour ugh". Just the thought of the timer going on in the background is often enough to make me want to do as much as I can in that half hour, break or no break. So as soon as I'm done typing this (which has taken far too long already aaaaa), I'm going to set the timer, write as much as I can for half an hour (which should hopefully be a thousand words or so), then do worldbuildy things for half an hour, then write for half an hour... you get the idea! I haven't actually tried this with writing yet, but ideally it will work just as well as it has for other tasks!

4. Meanwhile, in the same vein as pep talks, it might be worth joining your NaNo region so that you get additional pep talks and useful emails from your local MLs as well. I can only speak for my own region, of course, but the NaNoLanta Pandas have had some pretty cool things to say in years past, and I'm sure most other regions' mailings are equally cool!

4.5. Go read through the past few years' NaNo threads and read some of Hiikaru's posts. Seriously, some of the best pep talks/ideas and so cheerful and argh Hiikaru is awesome. ;-; (Upon closer inspection some of my advice just is reiterating some of what they said in their last post in this thread, but if Hiikaru thinks it is a good idea then it probably is! and then just a few extra helpful tips for working with those ideas hopefully?)

5. Try going to a write-in or something similar. I enjoyed myself and was actually quite productive at the two I went to in 2009—word wars are pretty fun when you conduct them in person, and in general surrounding yourself with caffeinated strangers who are doing the same crazy thing that you are is surprisingly motivating! (Just plain getting out of the house and writing in a different environment is often a big help, too.) Joining your region should also net you emails about/links to resources for finding a write-in near you, so there's that reason to sign up as well.

6. Try writing in a distraction-free environment instead of your usual word processor. A full-screen interface that hides the rest of your browser/desktop/dock/taskbar/computer and has very few toolbars/options, and often very few tempting-but-usually-unnecessary formatting capabilities, can help you keep your mind on your work. They're also nice because many of them include settings to let you easily adjust the background and text colors to something that's comfortable for you, and a few even have stuff like typewriter sounds if you really want to feel like you're away from a computer without being away from a computer. Right now I'm using Writebox, an online environment (also available as a Chrome extension) that edits text files either in your browser's local storage or on your Dropbox account—I usually write in text files these days anyway, and this has a less distracting interface than my usual text editor + a word count at the bottom. In the past, though, I've tried several others and they're all pretty good at what they do, and there are a lot of them out there you can try. I've used WriteMonkey for Windows, Focus Writer for Linux, and there are plenty of others like Q10 and DarkRoom and WriteRoom and more for those two OSes and Macs as well. If your browser can use the Stylish extension or something like it, there are even user styles that can give Google Docs/Drive a similar distraction-free look when used in full screen.

7. And while I'm on the subject of Dropbox and GDocs, back up your work! This is not directly related to productivity, but every year I am apparently the BACK UP YOUR CRAP PLEASE evangelist, and even though so far this year there have been no reports (that I'm aware of, anyway) of people losing tons of work, it's worth saying anyway. Almost every year someone on TCoD has lost work for one reason or another, myself included, and if you take steps to back things up as soon as possible then you'll be in a better position should tragedy strike. Paste your story into Google Docs, use Dropbox, store work on more than one flash drive/hard drive, email it to yourself, whatever! As long as it's in more than one place, preferably at least one online and one offline imo, you are far less likely to lose work (or to temporarily lose all access to it should your internet or one of your computers go on the fritz or something)! Saving the files you're working on in a Dropbox folder as I'm doing accomplishes the online-offline bit in one fell swoop, since it's both in the Dropbox folder on your computer and stored on the Dropbox servers with minimal effort on your part! (Though I'm still pasting things into GDocs just in case.) And hey, peace of mind certainly can't hurt your productivity, can it?

Also, yesterday when I finally got back to writing I tried doing it on my netbook instead of my desktop! I did it mostly because I'm still afraid of annihilating my wrists and was curious as to whether sitting away from the desk might help—it appears to have done so, so hopefully it will remain consistently painless!—but it also helped a little bit with the constant urge to click around on other things. I still had the desktop on and accessible if I really needed to check my notes or look something up or caved and just had to look at Tumblr or whatever, but otherwise I had the Writebox tab on my browser fullscreened and I sat just far enough away that even though the desktop browser was open, I wasn't actually all that tempted to get up and walk over to it just to goof off. So if you have a laptop or similar then maybe that's something to try?

tl;dr gotta catch up gotta catch up (especially because I might end up with a freelance job soonish?! oh no) but I'm finally in a place where I feel good about myself and like this second idea is going to be really fun!
 
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Well, I managed to force myself to write yesterday. It went alright, I even got a good action scene in. So count me in at around 4K.

I at least got them in Alftand and such. Now they got to get to Blackreach, without the Lexicon because I TOTALLY FORGOT IT.
 
Finishing on 24,457 today. Was going to get it up to 25,000 but I was just starting to write utter rubbish, so I'm going to leave it until the morning.
 
I have no idea how I'm managing to stay on schedule. But I'm doing it somehow, so I guess I shouldn't complain!

Now to see how far-fetched the idea of building up a buffer this weekend is. Lord knows I'll have enough distractions....
 
I came into NaNo with a concept and a beginning only, so by now I've advanced past that and the story is kind of just forming as I write. It's very surprising to see that it's actually better than the stuff I had planned out beforehand. It's very motivational. I've also been super busy the last two days, and have somehow managed to write the allotted amount in those two days, which is awesome.

A third of the way there!
 
haven't written in ~days~ but I do now have this:

64W6Q.jpgg


That's a basic map of where the novel mainly takes place. Gogrom will be where a major confrontation happens mid-way through the novel, and the northern Vordrim Territories will account for the next major happening. Korash and Kavesh are merely stop-overs in the journey to Gogrom, where the High Palace of the Golgrim Priestqueen waits.

The island is a pretty big island, it's like 2400 miles long and its name is Rostag. Those That Came Before called it Rosatar. The Wastes are the result of multiple nuclear detonations in the area some 600-800 years ago. The Golgrim Alliance is a loose federation of the three provinces (Golga, Vodrom and Mangrim) led by the Priestqueen of Gogrom High Palace.

so that's what I've been doing instead of writing, lol.
 
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Hah, that's actually really cool! How'd you put that together?

I made a map too, except it actually came from a generator so it's sort of fractally (didn't have any particular preference for how things were laid out, so I just mucked around until I found something shaped pretty and ran with it), and then I drew ugly blobs and lines all over it to block out where mountains and deserts and rivers and things were. and then also there were horribly inaccurate but i tried tectonic plates and trade winds and a bunch of other things i really didn't need to consider for a silly pokémon experiment hahaha why did i waste huge chunks of that "break" on this

Mine isn't nearly as clean-looking as yours, even if yours is just supposed to be basic, but at least it gives me a rough idea of where everything is, haha. I will make it look less like a five year old brutalized it with crayons some other time!
 
Finished today on exactly 27,000 words, which can only mean one thing: I am more than halfway through! This makes me stupidly happy. I can actually finish this!

EDIT: I've just realised that if I stay on course I will finish the novel around the 20th November. The end is so near to sight now that I am actually worried I won't be able to write the ending adequately enough...
 
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This one! It generates a whole world map with the land based on the parameters you give; you can just hit the "random" button until you get a basic layout that you like (you can preview it by clicking "create"), then change the iterations and the percentage of water/ice until it looks nice or gives you an idea or whatever. The results don't look as nice as Harle's map, and it's mostly just land with no rivers or other features, but it works as a good starting point and it can be generated in a lot of different map projections (including an animated globe so you can get a 360-degree view). I'm probably going to redraw mine by hand later with a few tweaks to the shapes of the continents, but for the time being, like I said, it's a helpful way to block out the basics I wanted.

This one is almost exactly the same, except when you click "create" it also generates statistics about the world, like its size and gravity compared to Earth's, the elements that comprise its atmosphere, what sort of lifeforms are found on it, that sort of thing. That part's not likely to be of too much use since it's more for quick planets for a space RPG or similar, since you'll already likely know what you want in terms of how breathable the air is and what lives there even if you don't know what you want the landmasses to look like, but it might give you some ideas for something anyway!

There is also a downloadable one called the Greenfish Relief Map Generator or something which is better for smaller scale maps, e.g. maps like Harle's where you only want part of a world/landmass as opposed to an entire planet. They also come out looking nicer right off the bat, though you'll still have to add some detail by hand. I don't recall the exact page but you can Google it and the Sourceforge download should pop up. I haven't used it often, though, because usually I need more discrete landmasses rather than things that continue beyond the edge of the map, and I haven't been able to get the Greenfish thing to do that very well.

Just don't play with the mapgens for too long because you should totally be writing!
 
Kratos Aurion said:
Hah, that's actually really cool! How'd you put that together?
Click to expand...

It's based on a number of different tutorials and techniques but isn't quite any of them, but I used this tutorial the most and if you follow that you should get basically the same result.

I made a map too, except it actually came from a generator so it's sort of fractally (didn't have any particular preference for how things were laid out, so I just mucked around until I found something shaped pretty and ran with it), and then I drew ugly blobs and lines all over it to block out where mountains and deserts and rivers and things were. and then also there were horribly inaccurate but i tried tectonic plates and trade winds and a bunch of other things i really didn't need to consider for a silly pokémon experiment hahaha why did i waste huge chunks of that "break" on this
Click to expand...

haha yeah I've tried to consider winds and plates and stuff for Ellos but it keeps looking like too much work so I never bother. as long as the map ~works~ it's fine though, I've spent way too long with mine (at least 20 hours over a fairly long period of time and it's not complete yet).

Mine isn't nearly as clean-looking as yours, even if yours is just supposed to be basic, but at least it gives me a rough idea of where everything is, haha. I will make it look less like a five year old brutalized it with crayons some other time!
Click to expand...

I was kind of just procrastinating when I improved the map of Rostag. I already had the mountains painted in but no cities, rivers and forests; I've since added all those things although you can't see the forests on that version of the map.

Kratos Aurion said:
This one! It generates a whole world map with the land based on the parameters you give; you can just hit the "random" button until you get a basic layout that you like (you can preview it by clicking "create"), then change the iterations and the percentage of water/ice until it looks nice or gives you an idea or whatever. The results don't look as nice as Harle's map, and it's mostly just land with no rivers or other features, but it works as a good starting point and it can be generated in a lot of different map projections (including an animated globe so you can get a 360-degree view). I'm probably going to redraw mine by hand later with a few tweaks to the shapes of the continents, but for the time being, like I said, it's a helpful way to block out the basics I wanted.
Click to expand...

That's actually really cool! I'd love to get a 3D view of my map but I'm not quite skilled enough to wrap the image around a sphere. Because that's hard and actually I'm missing bits anyway.

This one is almost exactly the same, except when you click "create" it also generates statistics about the world, like its size and gravity compared to Earth's, the elements that comprise its atmosphere, what sort of lifeforms are found on it, that sort of thing. That part's not likely to be of too much use since it's more for quick planets for a space RPG or similar, since you'll already likely know what you want in terms of how breathable the air is and what lives there even if you don't know what you want the landmasses to look like, but it might give you some ideas for something anyway!
Click to expand...

*bookmarks for a later date*

There is also a downloadable one called the Greenfish Relief Map Generator or something which is better for smaller scale maps, e.g. maps like Harle's where you only want part of a world/landmass as opposed to an entire planet. They also come out looking nicer right off the bat, though you'll still have to add some detail by hand. I don't recall the exact page but you can Google it and the Sourceforge download should pop up. I haven't used it often, though, because usually I need more discrete landmasses rather than things that continue beyond the edge of the map, and I haven't been able to get the Greenfish thing to do that very well.
Click to expand...

My small map above is actually just a very small part of a much larger world map. It's a huge thing. Rostag is basically the only place properly mapped out, although the Eastern Continent does have some mountains painted in (and grass and areas of nuclear wasteland)! (It's a very big map)

edit: updated my map, lol.
 
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