This is my plot bunny.
Last night I joined my sister on an outing. She's also a writer, but is more successful finishing short stories, whereas I am much more comfortable with long pieces. As a challenge for herself, she joined NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Last night was the first meeting/get-together of the Hawaii writers who signed up. People were able to adopt their very own plot bunnies.
It was mostly an informational, get to know others, here's what NaNo is about, kind of meeting. At the end, they had plenty of plot bunnies left, so I grabbed my own. My sister suggested naming him Gerald, but I refused, just to contrary. ;)
I have not signed up for NaNo yet. I don't know if I will. But they seemed open to people coming to the write-ins and other events, even if you aren't official, so I joined my sister.
NaNo is interesting for me, because they emphasized that, not only did it not matter how good the draft was of your 50,000 story, but you shouldn't delete anything. If you write a scene and there are two options, start writing one, and if it peters out, skip a line and write option 2. I guess that makes sense--you can certainly learn something through trying out both and rereading them to see which works better. Plus you don't lose thousands of words. But they also said don't bother with grammar or spelling mistakes (which I'd be incapable of ignoring). And some people throw in whole paragraphs of poetry or song lyrics. 'It's all counts as words.' I don't know how I feel about that.
I think it's because I can't imagine writing a story with complete disregard for the story, only thinking about the numbers. I see NaNo as a device to help writers finish what they start, or get farther than a few pages, at the very least. And that is a great thing. 'But shouldn't you still try to write a coherent story?' I ask myself. ~shrugs~ I still think this is a great oportunity for people like my sister, who can't seem to finish longer pieces of writing, but I don't know that it would work for me. Much as writers have different processes and writing styles, so do writers improve through different challenges (I hope that makes sense). I do like Normand, though. And I think, for Normand's sake, I will try to write 50,000 words over the course of a month. Not for the sake of a word-count, but to jump-start a new story, while querying with my urban fantasy.
For all of you who are registered and ready with the kernel of a story: Let NaNoWriMo begin!
Happy writing!
(And if this posts without the handy paragraph breaks, I did include them. Adding pictures sometimes makes the space between paragraphs all wonky. Go figure.)
2 comments:
Your plot bunny is cute--he looks like the boo-boo bunny we have in our freezer, who holds a little ice-pack thing for if you bump yourself.
I did Nano one year--it was fun to just write wildly, and to be doing something with so many other people. But yeah, it's not the way I write, either (and I didn't get to 50,000 words by the end of the month). I did finish the story, but haven't ever finished revising it, so haven't queried it anywhere. Do you have any seeds of ideas you'd like to jump start?
Good luck querying the urban fantasy novel, in any case.
I always think of doing NaNo, but I never do. I think it's a great way to jumpstart a story, but I personally wouldn't want to do it and completely obsess over the word count to the detriment of a plot.
I do have a couple of story ideas. I haven't decided which to work on yet, though, because I've been trying to wait until I have a stronger idea of the plot vs. writing by the seats of my pants.
Thank you for the luck.
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