Writing Meme created by Erin Penn
Getting Ready for NaNoWritMo
Like many writers, I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWritMo) in just a few short days. In preparation I visited the six-day Boot Camp Liana Brooks created in 2014 and republished in 2016 on her new blog, when I asked her if she could because it has been so useful to me.
The first Day concentrated on “Establish a Baseline“. In the thinly veiled co-operative Massive Online Game called NaNoWritMo, word count is king.
I like to point out writing 50 thousand words in a month and the techniques brought to bare to accomplish this are not exactly the professional process writers use, but NaNoWritMo does provide some of the skills, and the chance to test those skills, used by writers. It’s a game with lots of cool graphics, side quests, and companions; fun to play once a year. But if you go to it time and again and learn new “cheats” each time, the play becomes habit and the habit may become a profession.
Anyway, back to word count. Professional writers use metrics to meet deadlines; they learn the amount of pages or words they need to write each day. Establishing a baseline for NaNoWritMo develops the deadline/metric skills. Ms. Brooks provides four exercises to figure out your word count needs.
See the full blog post here: http://www.lianabrooks.com/nanowrimo-boot-camp-day-1-establish-a-base-line/
The upside of playing the NaNoWritMo game? At the end-of-the-month you have more to show for your efforts than the high score on a leader board. Even if you don’t “win”, you have words on paper.
WRITING EXERCISE: Do all four exercises as though you are thinking about participating in NaNoWritMo.
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My results
- Ten-minute speed. While I type about 50 words per minute, writing speed is much slower as I think things out. Instead of 500 words, it’s more like 100 words if I have the basics in my head or 50 words if I am still sorting things out. Let’s go with 75 per ten minutes.
- Until you can’t write anymore. Somewhere between 2 and a half and three hours I need a break, brain feels like it is leaking at that point. I really should set things up so I stop every 2 hours.
- Days of writing in November: I have at least four days where I am not going to write, so let’s say 25 days I can write. Calculation – Word count needed is 2,000 per day. A 2-hour block produces 900 words; I need two 2-hour blocks.
- What I need: Just need quiet and no other urgent tasks. I can only work on one major project at a time, therefore must complete the tax training before NaNoWritMo.