NaNoWriMo – T E Shepherd

Adventures in NaNoWriMo

Thomas — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 22:28:06 +0000

Doing NaNoWriMo this year was an experiment – an experiment in sustained productivity. I am a bit of a slow writer. Maybe not a slow writer of Alan Garner proportions, but slow nonetheless.

I’m not following full NaNoWriMO rules. I’m not writing something new, with the aim of reaching 50,000 words at the end of 30 days, and I’m certainly not aiming each day to write at least 1,667 words. That said, for the first 14 days of the challenge I took my self-imposed target of 500 words per day, and smashed it, averaging at somewhere nearer 800-900 words. One day I even topped 1000 – I think that was on a day that I thought I would struggle.

Halfway through exactly, on Day 15 of the challenge I had first wobble. I only managed 100 words. My excuse would be that I was busy having to do something else for band, but in truth I think I had a bit of, if not writers’ block, a stuck period. I had just finished one chapter, and hadn’t got stuck into the next, and I floundered.

Today though, I’ve got stuck back into it, and I’m back in the NaNoWriMo game…

My approach to getting stuff written

Thomas — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 21:06:17 +0000

So, it’s NaNoWriMO Day 2, and I am incredibly ahead of my (albeit reduced) wordcount target. I have no idea if it is a record year for NaNoWriMo participants but it certainly seems to be judging by my friends list on Facebook.

Of course, this is a thoroughly unscientific judgement to make. Equally unscientific is that the majority of participants are writing on their laptops (and thus, their wordcounts are exact). My wordcounts are approximations based on rough calculations…

My writing style is still, in this age of computers and electronic communications, longhand. See the picture below? This is me surpassing my conservative (but probably realistic) target of 500 words (I’ve actually gone on two more pages and started a new chapter!). You probably find this even more surprising when you hear that I work in web and social and digital media by day.

The truth is though that this is a system that always works. It’s a platform that doesn’t rely on internet connections or power supplies. It never crashes and its only a mild inconvenience if you drop it. I have a longer (possibly guest post elsewhere) brewing about my writing everywhere approach – I really should get down to it.

What’s your writing style? Are you ever tempted to give up on the laptop and return to the trusted pen and paper?

Getting my motivation back

Thomas — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 22:25:21 +0000

My current wip is about halfway done, and it’s been that way for too long. Not that it’s been stalled through writers’ block or anything like that, but just through lack of time and too much other life going on.

The start of November also means that it is the start of the annual NaNoWriMo. I’ve been aware of the National Novel Writing Month for, umm, probably about as long as I’ve been keeping an online journal – tots up the years – so that’ll be about 13 years now!! I’ve never done it because I don’t think that I could, practically write 1666 words every day for 30 days.

This year though, I’m going to try. Try at least to make some sizeable chunk out of my remaining word count. I’m going for about 500 words per day (more if I can) which equates to 3 pages of my handwritten notebook. I’m going to try, and see where this gets me. Hopefully it might get me to within shooting distance of The End.