Tag: encouragement

Finish Line Fever

Nanowrimo is over. You’ve won, or maybe you’ve almost won. There are no losers here. Everyone gets a trophy. Or you know, the idea of a trophy. You have a novel, that’s trophy enough.

But wait, there’s more.

After the writing comes two or three rounds of editing, spaced around more writing. You have to make sure all of your scenes work, make sure all of your characters are consistent. You have to cross all of your t’s and dot your lower case j’s.

After the editing comes the proofing, checking your story for style and grammar. Reading into, around, between, and through the lines to make sure you’re actually saying what you think you meant to write. read more

Nanowrimo Checkpoint 2

The end is in sight; don’t quit now! Writing a novel inside of a month is a challenging task. Maybe you’ve had some false starts. Maybe you’ve missed a few days worth of word count. (I’ve missed a few on the blog, and I’m not trying for novel-length word count.) The holidays make things more complicated. Work schedules increase without regard to what I’d actually rather be doing. Chances are, if it’s happened to me then you’ve had some of the same challenges.

The good news? The end of your novel is fast approaching. Those words are mounting up faster than you thought possible. You may be cruising to a climactic resolution like a warm summer breeze. The words might be leaking with increased difficulty. Nanowrimo is a marathon, and you’re an endurance athelete. read more

Pep Talk

Nanowrimo is more than half-way gone! Your novel has more than half of its total word count on the page. By now, the burst of energy that carried you through the sprint from the starting line has faded into a long, grueling marathon. Fear not, the second wind is coming. Soldier on! Write as if you mean it! Before you realize what’s happening, you’ll be in love with your story again and your characters will be springing from your fingertips onto the printed page. Pep talk’s over. It’s been a long weekend here, and it’s not over yet!nano read more

Cashing the Reality Check

By now some sharp-eyed reader has checked in on the blog and noticed a day is missing. “Hey,” this reader is saying, “Where’s my daily dose of writing insights? Where’s my daily encouragement during Nanowrimo? Where’s my cheese sandwich?” Through the magic of blogging I could engage in time manipulation, go back to yesterday and insert the post into the matrix as if nothing happened. But that’s not reality. Reality is that things don’t always go as planned, and no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. read more

Nanowrimo Checkpoint One

If you’re doing the Nanowrimo thing, you ought to be about a third of the way through your novel writing journey. This is a good chance to take stock of your progress, see how far you’ve come and how far you’ve yet to go. Writing a novel is about more than just work count, even in Nanowrimo. This is the right to time to check your course and perform a correction if need be.

Word count is the first thing the Nanowrimo author should check. The goal is 50,000 words. How far along are you? Have you been keeping pace? I don’t know exactly where I fall in relation to other writers or typists in terms of speed, but I’ll share a few quick personal stats. When I’m writing articles or research papers, essentially anything for which I need to get the facts right the first time, I average about 500-750 words an hour. When I’m writing fiction and I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m going or how to get there I still make about the same speed. When I’m in the zone, when the words are flowing, and when the story is practically telling itself, I can do 1500-2000 words in an hour. Most of the time, I fall right between those extremes at 750-1000 words. read more