Lucynda Storey-Erotic Romance Writer

This week I’m starting a new feature on my blog.  I’m calling it the Web Site of the Week.

This week I’ve selected the National Novel Writing Month web site, NaNoWriMo. This project started ten years ago by Chris Baty author of No Plot, No Problem, has grown to 90,000 particpants from its humble beginnings of 21 authors.

A lot of my author friends are participating including Lisa Pietsch, Dawn Montgomery, and J.M. Snyder.  Additionally, other friends are doing modified versions of NaNo to finish up WIPs (Works in Progress) and meet other deadlines.

The goal of the NaNo project is to write 50,000 words by midnight November 30th.  The web site has a sign-in program which lets participants keep track of their progress and that of specific individuals and/or groups.

This will be the fifth year I’ve participated.  It’s a crazy good time.

Some recommendations for the first week of NaNo, from Chris’s book are:

Ride the wave of momentum.  Get as muchdone while you are excited as possible.

Don’t delete, italicize.  Every word counts, even if you aren’t thrilled with all of them, and may indeed delete them on the editing phase (after the month is over).  If you are leaning toward deletion, italicize instead.  That way you get your word count and a visible reminder of where it is you don’t like what you’ve written.  This is one way to keep the editor hag at bay while you let your creativity run.

Keep a notes file.  Paste in words, thoughts, phrases, dialogue and save it here for potential later use.  While it is easier for some to keep it on the computer, there is no reason this can’t be done with a paper file and scrapes of paper from notebooks, etc.

Keep your work to yourself.  It’s too early to show what you’ve written.  It’s in rough draft form right now and showing it to others opens up your WIP to criticism when now isn’t the time for those well meaning critiques.

A word written is a word closer to your goal.  And even if you don’t make it (I haven’t yet), that still puts you that many words closer to your goal. I’ve had several times where I’ve gotten 30-40,000 words written…far enough to be able to finish a complete novel by the end of the year.  That was a 30,000 words head start.  There is no failure if you get words on the page.

Best of luck to everyone participating. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.