Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Caz]

No nanowrimo thread on bay12? For shame guys.

I am doing ok so far this year but the inevitable week 2 slump is on the horizon. Writing fantasy/dieselpunk with splotches of sci-fi.

They revamped www.nanowrimo.org to a new form which is a bit confusing at first, but allows the ability to create projects year-round and to record their progress. Very useful!

Anyone else doing the month of writing madness?



Infos for the confused:

What is NaNoWriMo?
NaNoWriMo is an informal challenge to anyone who wants to write.  The idea is simple: you simply have to write 50,000 words of a story during the month of November.  You don't necessarily have to finish the story, so long as you write that many words, and it doesn't matter what the story is.  This isn't going to be published anywhere without you doing it, so it can be fanfiction for all that the challenge cares.

The point is to just get words down.  A lot of writers agree that this is the hard part, and you can easily get stuck trying to edit or world build.  From experience, I can say that it's very true, and anyone who wants to give this a shot is strongly encouraged to not fret about the quality of your work and just focus on getting a first draft down.  I did last year and hate how it turned out, but I'm still glad I did it since it puts me in a better place to try it this year.

Is this a competition?
Not really.  You're only challenging yourself.  You can certainly compare your progress to others, but it's informal and you won't get anything but a warm, fuzzy feeling for beating someone else.

Is my writing safe?
Sure.  You don't have to publish anything you write, and nanowrimo.org just has a tool for inputting word counts.  They have a word count utility as well, which supposedly scrambles the text so that nobody could possibly steal it, but in seriousness there's no reason to be afraid of whatever you're writing getting out in the wild without you doing it.

Can I win anything?
Only personal satisfaction, which is a surprisingly good thing in my experience.  Supposedly you can get some discounts on software or other sponsored goodies if you "win" by hitting 50K words, but I don't actually know how this works.  I "won" last year, but didn't investigate that part.

Can't I just cheat and enter whatever I want in the word count tool then?
Sure, but you're only cheating yourself in the end.  The whole point is to make something of your own and prove to yourself that you can do it.

Official website:
https://nanowrimo.org/

Links to previous years:
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009

Advice:

The writer's natural tendency is to eat their (written) child moments after its birth is complete. Unfortunately, that child must be raised (editted) and not eaten.

Write!

[Caz]

>_> *wanders the graveyard the Bay12 forums have become*

I'm still keeping up with par. Probably should have actually outlined something though cause I have no idea where this is going.

[Skynet]

I'm working on a NaNoGenMo project, but I'll probably not going to have much time to get far. Essentially, I'm going to use AI Dungeon to generate content for a very short RPG sourcebook for Legend of the Five Rings, and then append a bunch of "meows" at the end. If I had more time or patience, obviously I would try to use AI Dungeon to generate the whole 50,000 words, but...let just say that it will require a lot of manual curation and editing to make it work out.

[Caz]

AI dungeon is fun. I like using it for writing prompts. Great when you're not sure of which direction to take the story.

[Skynet]

I was able to finish my NaNoGenMo project - a decent RPG sourcebook about the Kolat (a secret society in Legend of the Five Rings). 3,260 words of content, and 46,740 meows. You can look at the GitHub issue for the project and the code repository.

I did format the resulting document (sans meows) into a nice PDF for people to look at.

[Caz]

I was able to finish my NaNoGenMo project - a decent RPG sourcebook about the Kolat (a secret society in Legend of the Five Rings). 3,260 words of content, and 46,740 meows. You can look at the GitHub issue for the project and the code repository.

I did format the resulting document (sans meows) into a nice PDF for people to look at.

Nice. I don't know what a meow is though I ended up giving up at 35k because I completely ran out material and it started to impact my studies. Still a much better attempt than last year.

[Skynet]

Awesome. And if you ran out of material, it's okay to just stop writing. Not everything needs to be a novel, after all.

[Telgin]

Whoops, I feel bad for not creating a thread this year, and only accidentally found this one long after the fact.

I almost didn't do NaNoWriMo this year, but decided to reuse my concept from last year at the eleventh hour.  I managed to get 50k words written about a fantasy world with sapient dragons living in an undead apocalypse, but like every other NaNo project it wasn't finished and isn't worth finishing.  Maybe next year and a third attempt will bring something worth completing.

[Caz]

Whoops, I feel bad for not creating a thread this year, and only accidentally found this one long after the fact.

I almost didn't do NaNoWriMo this year, but decided to reuse my concept from last year at the eleventh hour.  I managed to get 50k words written about a fantasy world with sapient dragons living in an undead apocalypse, but like every other NaNo project it wasn't finished and isn't worth finishing.  Maybe next year and a third attempt will bring something worth completing.

Sounds interesting. Did you enjoy it at least?

I keep making projects I mean to go back to but then never find the time for. -.-

[Telgin]

Yeah, it wasn't as much of a slog as the first time I tried NaNoWriMo, since by now it's my fourth time doing it and I've gotten a bit more used to making myself write the words, but along with that is a definite incentive to just get words out instead of writing good prose.  I think that's what's more or less intended with NaNoWriMo - you write a quick rough draft to get ideas on paper, then redraft it later if you think it's worth finishing and turning into publishable work.

In this case I'm not sure the ideas I had were really worth pursuing and would need a lot of work to turn into something worth keeping.  "Dragons in a fantasy world with an undead apocalypse and corporeal gods running the last bastion of civilization" seems like a premise that would have a lot of potential, but I somehow managed to turn it into a lowkey story about a priest of the local god of healing whose girlfriend was a "priestess" of the local god of war and is really more of a city guard.  My plan was to make the story about the two of them being sent to help reclaim territory outside of that last city to push back against the undead, but it came out a little dull.

[Caz]

I think there's a lot of increasing popularity for 'slice of life' stories in big settings. The whole 'now you must save the world!' got tired I think.

If I start thinking the story is getting a bit boring I just add subplots. This is why everything endes up an overcomplicated mess in the end.