RSSThirty Days Of Writing
November 8, 2010
Martin Kelly - See all 164 of my articles
The writing frenzy continues. If you are participating in the National Novel Writing Month, we have entered the second week. You should be at about 13,000 words. I have fallen pretty far behind having just crested 6,000 words. The goal is to write as much as possible, getting to the 50,000 word count by the end of November is the challenge.
If you did start writing on November first, you should be well into your story. Even if you do not have a full outline, try to capture at least some interesting event. If events are eluding you, try some descriptive paragraphs. Describe one of you characters, what he wears, what her physical characteristics are, what his dream are, what she is feeling. Short on characters? Describe the location, the surroundings, from weather to decorations, anything to put some body behind the story.
My current effort is a science fiction story. I just have chunks of stuff. I have done some character development for a few of my characters. I have described the space ship in petty good detail. I have even done some premonition work, describing what their goal is. I still do not have a complete outline. I have a couple of climaxes sketched out, but no conclusion.
As I commented last week, it is hard to set aside time to write. My Saturday was taken up helping a friend reroof his garage. Weeknights are taken up with helping my kids with homework, housework and paying attention to my wife. I am pretty excited about writing at the 50% rate that I have accomplished. I hope that some of our readers are doing better.
If you are just writing down any ideas you have, you can get a lot written. I can capture between 500 and 800 words an hour. That is words that make any sense at all. So two hours a night should be all I need to put aside. My problem is that I want to concentrate on this one story, and I just can not seem to get two hours to write. Tonight (Sunday) I have a chance. I am writing this article first, then back to writing the novel. I would love to be able to report that I have completed the challenge again when we get to November 30th, but again, my goal is to write and encourage you to write.
Nov 08, 2010 @ 21:14:00
Hmm. Your mention of your capture rate has me curious what mine is. It MUST be higher than 500-800, because I write most of my Soap Boxer articles in an hour or less (out of necessity more than desire). I know I had one day last year where I knocked out about 10K words in something like a 27 hour span – and it couldn’t have possibly been more than 5 hours of writing time. That was an extreme exception, though, and far from typical (and was probably fuled by Pepsi and Pringles). I had a really good flow going and just kept writing as fast as I could type (which, sadly, is not very fast).
Having said that, I generally do quite a bit of mental composition before I sit down to write, so I’m not going from blank slate to finished product at that speed. It can (and often does) take me a week to mentally compose a 700 word short story.
Hope you had a good writing session on Sunday. It has been a long time since I’ve had a decent 60+ minute writing session 🙁