Thursday, November 4, 2010
NaNo - it's not gonna be perfect the first time around
You will write drivel. Or as it's more commonly known, crap. It will be mixed in with the good stuff. 50,000 words in 30 days is a lot. Don't kid yourself that it's not. You're essentially just spewing stuff at the page sometimes with little to no regard for style, detail, super secret messages, all that. You're just treading water trying to keep your head up. That's what the editing process is for later. Once you've written the bloody thing and taken a break from it you get to go back and edit. Then you send it to a beta. Then you get to make corrections and maybe edit some more. And back to the beta. Add, subtract, rework. Your final finished and polished product might even wind up being under the 50,000 word mark. That's not the point. The point for NaNo is getting those original 50,000 words down. You can clean it up later. Get the ideas out there.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Good advice! Also, thanks for pointing out that it might be less than the 50k in its final form...I worried about that. :) I figure I will cut out a lot and wondered if that meant I would have to fill the space w/more writing. (Because NaNo definitely gets to decide what I do after this, right? :D)
ReplyDeleteNo problem. I wrote it out to remind myself, mostly. I keep wanting it to just flow out perfectly even though I know better. :)
ReplyDeleteYeah, I guess that after NaNo when it gets edited my fic will come in under the 50K mark. I'm okay with that because I want it to be tight, and good. And I know I'm probably going to throw in some unnecessary stuff to make certain I hit the deadlines!
After November we get to rebel against the NaNo lord!