Just wanted to post a quick update about my progress during the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’m almost caught up at 9,011 words on day 6 – just 900 words shy of my overall daily goal. My eyes are starting to cross, so it’s time to put my story to sleep for the night and get cracking at it again tomorrow and hope that I can make it to my Day 7 goal.
Stuff I’ve learned so far:
- 1667 words a day are a lot… I usually write in the library on my lunch hour for 35-45 minutes and can knock out about 400 words. Then, when I get home after grabbing food for dinner and then cooking it (doesn’t take long and takes my mind of sitting in front of the computer all day at work), I either sit down on my favorite recliner with netbook on my lap or at the kitchen table and crank out 2 or 3 more scenes.
- Weekends are not for catchup. Learned that this go around when I had 2 slow days during the week. Of course, I still want to enjoy stuff with my family instead of writing all day. So, I’ll be trucking on all week, so I can have a little down-time for family.
- I need mellow music to work on my novel or I can’t see the movie in my head… you know what I mean, I’m sure.
- By turning my screen to black background and green writing (I use Scrivener Software for writing) I can just focus on the story instead of playing with word-count charts etc.
- I try not to get bogged down with outlining. I have a very lose skeleton outline and every day, I look at possible scenes that I could write and pencil / type them in. When I begin writing a scene, I first add some random key words that come to my head that I may want to cover or mention in that section. The filling in happens as I watch my “movie” as it plays out in my head and my fingers do the typing.
So, this is the update for about almost a week into the challenge. I’ll post more updates when my characters let me.