Hello, writers. It’s that time of year. For the third time in the history of our relationship, NaNoWriMo approaches.
The idea behind NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is that writers commit themselves to writing 50,000 words during the month of November. There’s a website. Although the website says “Write a novel in a month!”, 50k is too short for an adult novel. And, of course, what you’ll have on November 30th is a rough draft.
(Or, to use a term I just heard from my new editor, “a loose draft”. I think a loose draft is a step down from a rough draft.)
If you decide to do NaNoWriMo (whether officially or un), you’ll be shooting for 1,667 words a day, or roughly 2000 a day if you miss four days. This means dropping your affective filter, kicking out your internal editor and just letting loose.
It’s a good exercise, and very useful if you’ve got a novel sitting in your head that you just can’t seem to get started on.
(Btw, if you’re really stuck starting something, skip the beginning and start in the middle.)
I did NaNoWriMo unofficially in 2009, I think maybe at Mnemonosyne’s urging, and wrote the middle grades fantasy that sold to HarperCollins.
Okay, that’s a tad misleading.
I had already spent months drawing pictures of the characters and writing random scenes and bits of backstory and stuff like that. And the 50k words that I wrote during November, 2009 bear very little resemblance to the 77k manuscript that sold in June, 2011. Looking at it now, about all I can say is the characters have the same names.
But if you do NaNoWriMo, with or without signing up at the website, what you’ll have on November 30th will be a framework for the real art of writing, which is revising. Then you can revise your writerly little heart out.
Revising’s a lot more fun than loose drafting.
Tonight’s challenge:
Below is a dialogue. Flesh it out—show us who’s speaking. Give us some sense of what’s happening.
On the loose draft, write it however you want. Open your mind and accept no restrictions.
But before you post it, take out all adverbs (except “not” and except time indicators such as “now” and “soon”).
Take out all adjectives except articles (a, an, the) and except possessives (my, cfk’s). Okay, maybe that’s a little steep. You can keep up to three adjectives if you want.
Then look at what you’ve got. Ask yourself if it’s smoother and more concise than what you had before. If it’s not, try to think of stronger or more precise nouns and verbs than the ones you’ve got. (But don’t use synonyms for “said”. Well, okay, you can use one synonym for “said”. Once.)
“You shouldn’t have come.”
“You must have known they’d send someone.”
“I didn’t know it would be you. Anyway, you’ll never find them.”
“It’s ’them’ now?”
“There are thousands. And every one of them beyond your reach.”
“My reach? Perhaps.”
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