Nanowrimo - Tumblr Posts
So I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year
The first thing I wrote was this little blurb about motivating yourself when you feel like you're not good enough, something I struggle with pretty often. I thought it might help some people so here it is:
"Don't get upset at yourself if you aren't as successful as someone else. Make something interesting and fun to you, the rest will follow. It doesn't have to be a tightly crafted masterpiece or a work of genius. It doesn't even have to be good. But it needs to be done, and you're the only one who can do it.
Don't get discouraged when you read or play or watch something, thinking "I could never make something that good." Instead, think about how you can learn from it to make your own projects better.
Nobody else wants to write your story. But you do, and you can, and you must."
Best of luck to everyone who wants to express themselves.
In the midst of another NaNoWriMo controversy, I'm going to take a second to recommend TrackBear (https://trackbear.app/) to anyone looking for a new way to track their writing.
You can have multiple WIPs going at once that can all count towards the same goal, or you can make it so only select WIPs can count towards a goal.
You can have "Habits" or "Goals." A goal is 50k in a month, and a habit is 1667 for 30 days.
It also has a leaderboard for you and any friends that you are writing with.
I've enjoyed it a lot these past couple of months, and I find it a fantastic (and a better) alternative to NaNoWriMo's word tracker.
So.... I tried NaNo this month and lol, I can't believe I even thought my brain would allow this to work for a second.
I really tried though.
So here's a summary:
The first week: I tried working on an old idea of mine I wanted to re-write. I just couldn't get into it no matter how hard I tried though.
Second week: I got obsessed with Resident Evil and got an idea for another story. So with no planning, I started writing that instead.
Second week P. 2: I assumed I was gonna actually write this new idea, but I kept feeling bad every day and stopped working on everything all together.
Second week P. 3: I decided to build a site after seeing a super cool post.
Third week: I built the site and got obsessed with learning more about coding html.
Every week after that was slowly learning about html, coding, and web design.
In between that time I randomly got interested in a story I "finished" about a year back and started to edit it.
So far, that editing turned into my NaNo.
All things considered, it found a way to work itself out.
@lightsaber-dorphin
#I need this in a time-travel fic
Ooooh!
Color me intrigued!
I'll have to do it in the 7 days I have left before NaNoWriMo though, as I'm participating this year
... Someone's probably already said this, but if Ahsoka's training Sabine, who was also trained by Kanan...
The shatterpoint lineage has crossed over with the disaster lineage. Mace Windu must be rolling in his grave.
me trying to come up with something for NANOWRIMO
How I Write: A Look Under the Hood
This month is NaNoWriMo, so in honor of that, I am totally procrastinating working on the fic I’ve been writing in favor of showing you how I write instead. Because that makes perfect sense. Keep in mind that this is my own personal writing process, and doesn’t represent a One True Way, nor does it reflect what other authors do. It’s not even necessarily consistent for all of my writing. Find what works for you.
Strap in, because this is wordy.
The writing has to start somewhere, of course, and that’s the Idea.
(Honestly, I don’t know if there’s anyone who just starts writing without any idea of what they’re actually going to put down, but if you know of something that started somewhere other than a basic idea, let me know because I want to see this.)
Ideas can come from just about anywhere. I have a file where I jot down any interesting elements from my dreams that had me wanting more when I woke up, or felt like something interesting to explore. I have another file saved from when I was in grade school and just had all these ideas for different novels, including whole series, and wrote down back cover blurbs for each so I could remember what I had in mind. I have a fanfiction-specific folder where I keep track of different fanfic ideas that come to mind, whether it’s fixing a perceived problem in the existing narrative, writing something alternate-universe because I wanted to, or “novelizing” an existing story. In most cases, these start as single paragraphs to get the meat of the idea down, and I may later return to the file and flesh things out as I come up with more to add to a given story seed.
Whatever the method, my stories need to start with that Idea, or I’m going nowhere.
To use the Dragon Age fic I’m working on for NaNo, I knew from the start that I wanted to essentially “novelize” my canon playthrough of the game series, so I created a document for my Warden from Dragon Age Origins and started with a single paragraph at the top describing what I was going to do with the story.
The next step in writing is developing an Outline.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not strictly talking about the kind of outline they make you write in high school to firmly lay out how you’re going to write an essay. You can totally do that kind of outline if you want, but it’s not the only way to do this, and not the way I usually do (not for the whole plot, at least). When I talk about an outline, what I mean is a more developed sense of where the plot is going to go than just the one-to-ten sentence blurb of the Idea. This can be as simple as a longer plot summary (like on Wikipedia), or it can actually be broken up into bullet points, subsections, or even a chapter-by-chapter breakdown if I have a strong enough idea of how the plot is going to play out.
I’ve actually done all of these approaches, depending on what works best. Bullet points work better if I’m just collecting ideas in a disjointed format. Chapter breakdowns work better when I have a solid idea of what the events of each chapter will be, and keep me on track for ending each chapter on the right beats to keep the plot flowing. When I don’t know where the actual chapters will begin and end, but do know the overarching flow of the plot, I go with a long plot summary potentially divided into subsections, and play the chapter breaks by ear as I write.
This is how my DA fic is structured at this point. I don’t know for certain how many chapters I’ll be writing or where each one is going to begin and end, so instead I have a long file just summarizing the entire plot in paragraph format. Subsections are divided by the game’s plot segments and give me a visual organization of the document, but those subsections don’t strictly represent chapter breaks. Any given subsection may cover just part of a chapter, or end up broken into several when it’s time to write. The point is to get the plot down on paper in order (or close to it), especially if you have a timeline to keep track of.
If the story takes place over a long enough period of time, or I may need to shuffle events and their timing around, then I may create a separate timeline document in order to keep track of seasons, travel time, etc. This way the story doesn’t just take place entirely on sunny late-spring days. I’ve done this in text files, on graph paper, and via calendars. The above Origins timeline was managed via Google Sheets, creating a calendar format where I could move cells around as I shuffled the events and made sure the timing of everything lined up with canon.
In addition to the broad plot outline, I often write out a more detailed outline for each chapter as I get to it, a breakdown of events for that specific chapter.
This can double as a checklist so I make sure I hit the story beats I have in mind for the chapter in question, and can give me an idea of which parts can be done via flashback, skipped, or otherwise referenced rather than written wholesale, and if there’s a point that makes a logical chapter break after I’ve laid it out. These are generally done in bullet points or actual tiered outline formats.
The next step happens concurrently with crafting the Outline: compiling Notes.
I have an idea I want to develop. I have a sense of where the plot is going to go. But in order to write it consistently, I’m going to need notes. Outside information that would gum up the outline if I were to include it there, but that is still important regardless of what I’m writing.
You can consider these reference materials. I’ll create files to track things like setting descriptions, character nicknames, how a magic system works, which characters I’ll need to track in a story and what their abilities and relations are, what religions exist in a setting, etc. This allows me to keep track of important side information without making my outline impossible to navigate, and helps me to avoid continuity errors or contradicting canon.
Something else I will track in my notes will be specific dialogue I come up with (or quotes from existing materials if writing fanfiction) that I want to include when writing, but I’m not at that point in the story yet. I will jot down the dialogue in a file for later reference so I can remember the exact wording, because I will forget.
Time to actually get Writing (the first draft).
There are different ways to approach this, as with anything. I actually prefer to do my fiction writing via longhand, in a college-ruled notebook dedicated to that purpose, and with rare exceptions I write the chapters in the order in which they’re intended to be read. The notebook is portable and it’s not subject to power outages. My writing pace is such that I can knock out a decent amount of words when I hit my stride, but I can also easily go back over things and make edits as necessary. I can write in the margins, I can cross out text and write just above it, and I can leave myself little reference notes to refer back to later.
It’s important to note that one thing that makes this work is that I do the writing predominantly in a smallcaps handwriting style. This makes the words easy to read for later transcription, and keeps the text fairly uniform in height so that I have just enough room to write above a line when adding a later segment. I do switch to cursive to represent italics, and a non-smallcaps print style for double italics. The end result can be messy (the above example is one of the worse pages I’ve done), but as long as I can decipher my alterations when I transcribe the page, it works. I even once taped a sheet of loose-leaf paper into a notebook to completely rewrite a section that wasn’t working.
I’ve also done my first draft digitally before, but I find I don’t work as well that way. The main issue is being tethered to my PC (a desktop computer) in order to write this way, but I also find it a bit more difficult to check where I want to change up sections or rework things in this format. But that’s me.
One additional element to the actual writing is that I like to keep a thesaurus handy.
This is because, while I do have a good-sized vocabulary, I’m still prone to repetition when writing, and that can get stale. A thesaurus allows me to find variant words, though it’s important to double-check the definition (synonyms often have slightly different meanings), and avoid being too flowery.
The next step after Writing is Editing.
I see this as a collection of smaller steps that lead to the story’s final polished form. Some edits happen during the writing step, as the confines of the notebook medium allow. Once I finish writing a chapter, I tend to have one round of medium-to-major edits, followed by at least one additional pass for minor edits.
My major edits happen when I transcribe the story. I prop the notebook up where I can see it comfortably and type it up in a word processing program, making the changes I’d previously noted. Sometimes it’s a margin note to alter or expand a section. Sometimes I’ll get an idea for another change as I see everything coming together. Sometimes I’ll realize a section just doesn’t mesh and have to rebuild it. Sometimes I’ll spot repeated words or thoughts; as with writing, I will keep the thesaurus handy for changing those out.
Once the chapter has been transcribed, I run a spellcheck with the standard dictionary (anything that I would find in an English dictionary) plus a custom dictionary for the story’s setting. This will catch any words I’ve accidentally misspelled or that aren’t yet in one of the two dictionaries.
Next, if it’s a story I’m sharing with my beta reader, I upload the chapter file to a folder on Google Drive that she has access to. She’ll look it over and comment, catching errors I’ve missed, making corrections to continuity, and comments on story flow. I will also usually give the chapter another read-over during this time to see if I spot any errors that I missed on the previous passes, especially if it’s something my beta is not reviewing for me. I implement the changes as needed, then copy the chapter to the master story file, which has all the chapters in order so I can track total page and word counts and read it as one continuous document if I want.
At this point, I’m generally done, though I may go back and re-read the transcribed sections, and occasionally I will still find an error I need to fix, which I do in all three locations.
Finally, it’s time to Publish.
This is the step that I reach less often. None of my original work is at a point where I feel it can be professionally published, but I will post short stories, snippets, and poetry online in various places. I know I’m the flaky type, too, so when I’m working on a longer fanfic, I try not to start posting it until I’m close to done, if not completely finished, after I ended up taking a ten-year hiatus in the middle of a multi-chapter fic due to my own flightiness. I do need to try to be better about pacing and publishing, though, because I love the sharing aspect and getting feedback on my work.
So there you go. My writing process, about as wordy as anything else I do.
you can speak to other writers for advice. You can post snippets and get feedback. You can trouble shoot on social media.
Writing groups were a thing long before generative AI entered the picture. Why do people act like this is no longer a thing?
The thing that really gets me about the NaNo AI thing in a this-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-frustrating/infuriating/tragic way is that yes NaNo is about writing and creativity, building habits and creating etc.
But it's also about community and a lot of the bullshit reasons they cite for promoting AI tools are problems that are solved inherently through community. Things like "some people struggle with certain aspects of writing" and "some people don't know what do at this point" etc.
They say you need AI because you can't afford certain services but you can speak to other writers for advice. You can post snippets and get feedback. You can trouble shoot on social media.
Obviously they fucked up with their forums but prior to that they had tonnes of resources for structuring, editing and the craft in general - both technically and creatively. They could have focused on rebuilding that instead of pushing AI tools that scrape people's work and aren't anywhere near as nuaced as humans are.
Community on the internet is dying so I'm not saying it would be easy (see every single post by a fic writer on tumblr for the past three years as fandom is treated more and more like a commodity) but a large org like this should be better placed to try right?
NaNoWriMo 2021
It’s NaNoWriMo time again. And again, I am participating without the goal of pushing to actually reach the 50,000 word mark. Even so, I’ve started off even slower than I’d hoped. I have so far averaged about 300 words a day these first couple days. So I will push a little because I’d like to see a few 1000 or more word days even if that’s not a pace I can maintain. My other personal goal is to…
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It's NaNoWriMo time again
It’s NaNoWriMo time again
And I’ve signed up. . . again. This year I really wanted to win. To really put effort into my word count, but I’m (not surprisingly) off to a slow start. ONly 500 words on the first day. I’m not doing the official method in that I’m continuing a novel I started in 2020. I few days before NaNo started this year, I thought I’d better review what I’d written so far because it has been many months…
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Apparently, I thought I would be able to do NaNoWriMo, but guess what. After 6 consistent days of writing, I fell into the hole of fanfiction, and didn’t write for 4 bloody days. Which explains why I wrote at 3 am, trying to redeem myself.
And then, yesterday, I wrote some more, BEFORE, I went to my other WIP to not just WRITE BUT ALSO EDIT.
In conclusion, I am thriving even though I’m supposed to be taking my exam now
bruh this is so infuriating as someone who writes and has used AI just to see what it does human writers are just…better it may take longer yes but AI didn’t have that image humanness to it that we have
classist and ablest my ass, I have dyslexia and ADHD and yet I still sit down and write and get better and better. AI can suck it.
So it looks like NaNoWriMo are happy to have AI as part of their community. Miss me with that bullshit. Generative artificial intelligence is an active threat to creativity and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people in creative fields.
Please signal boost this so writers can make an informed choice about whether to continue to take part in such a community.
I know most people on here don't like to go to the gym because you're all gay nerds. I like to go to the gym. For the purpose of understanding this post please try to imagine that you, too, enjoy going to the gym so that you can empathize with my point here.
Anyway, so imagine you are going to the gym. You're pumped about the concept of getting some muscle on you. Plus, the gym has this "lift weights every day!" challenge with a feasible plan to slowly and safely increase the amount of weight you can lift by the end of the month. Cool!
So anyway you go there, and you're having a good time. But then you notice something. Some people are coming in with these guys in shirts that say LIFT FOR HIRE. You're curious, and you notice over time that some people are actually paying these guys to come in and do the lifting challenge for them.
"Huh," you say to your mega hot, muscled gym buddy. "That's so weird. What's in it for the people paying these guys?"
"Dunno," says your friend, mid bicep curl.
"Um, actually!" says the gym owner. "Some people are disabled, so the only way they can lift weights it to pay LIFT FOR HIRE, inc."
"But wait," you say. "They still aren't lifting the weights though? Paying someone else to lift for you doesn't mean you've lifted the weights."
The gym owner gasps. "How could you SAY that?"
"Because... it's true?" you say. "Uh, if you pay guys to lift your weights, that's probably really good for the guys you are paying. But it's not going to develop your ability to lift at all. Your muscles aren't going to grow, you're just going to lose money and get no results."
"That's ABLEIST," they say. "How DARE you! Some people are LITERALLY paralyzed, did you think of that?"
"Well, yeah, some people are, and that means definitionally they can't lift weights," you explain. "And paying someone else doesn't change that. Maybe if they wanted to like, move something in their house it would make total sense to hire these guys! But if you hire them to do your workout you get nothing, because the purpose of a workout is personal development. I'm not morally condemning people who do it, but it seems like a waste of money when this event is, again, about improving one's personal abilities."
"This is absolutely DISGUSTING, CLASSIST rhetoric!" the gym owner roars, and then turns to one of the LIFT FOR HIRE guys, "Pay no attention this disgusting person, dear sponsor, we support your business and we totally want you to keep funding our gym!"
"Sponsor?" says your hot muscled friend who was way too busy actually doing their workout and getting gains to engage in dumb discourse. "Oh, now it makes sense."
"Shut up, you don't understand our love!" says the gym owner, before sloppily making out with a LIFT FOR HIRE guy in front of you.
Anyway, that's what learning about the whole AI nanowrimo controversy was like for me.
3.4k words in already!
NaNoWriMo!
Who is going for the challenge this month?
Reblog with your style (Pants versus Plotting versus a combo), genre, and favorite snack/beverage!
The worse the explanation, the better.
me, with a vague plot idea, 1 (one) character name, and an outline that consists of mostly question marks:
My first thought: I think I want cereal for breakfast.
My second thought: THERE'S NO TIME FOR CEREAL.
