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Nov. 15th, 2013 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI fell behind on NaNo because of Philcon, and in point of fact I'm still behind, but I did three consecutive days with word counts above 3000 to make up a lot of ground. Last night I exceeded 20,000 words. I am supposed to be at 25,000 by the end of today, but that won't happen.
I'm pretty sure that as a story it is not very good, but I am enjoying writing it anyway. A fellow NaNoer (I will use the official nomenclature 'WriMo' only when I am in company I am certain will comprehend it) keeps asking me if I think the kitchen is the main character of my story, but though I definitely do like writing the kind of crazy things where the kitchen the main character, I keep demurring to his question. This is a novel about three friends who share an apartment, not a novel about the kitchen, even though the kitchen is the setting that drives the novel.
Nonetheless, there is a lot of terrible food writing littering these pages. If I ever were to try editing this into something I would let other people read, the first order of business would be to actually research reasonable recipes to replace the shit I'm making up off the top of my head as I frantically try to reach wordcount. The recipes I am writing have the look of real recipes, but none of the logic.
The mechanics of writing for NaNoWriMo are not like the mechanics of other writing projects. Word count is king, and quality is your last concern. The trick is to keep forward motion by any means possible, letting momentum keep you from running out of inspiration. So any time you're stuck, you don't stop to think about the best way out of your problem, you write around it. Some people do this by skipping ahead to a part where they're not stuck, and I've sometimes used this technique, but mostly I do it by plowing straight ahead with stalling dialogue until something breaks the logjam.
You fill your writing with redundant adverbs and you repeat things as often as you can get away with. The very odd feeling I have when doing NaNo is that I know what I am writing is terrible, and I am constantly making little mental notes in my head not to use the technique I am using in NaNo for other things.
Despite this, I don't feel like I get many bad writing habits from NaNo. When I wrote "He Was a Beautiful Fiction," the comments keyed in on the way I switched narrative modes seamlessly twice, and I realized that I'd done this because it felt right, because I had experimented with such stylistic jumps in my 2010 NaNo "The Great American Metanovel" and even though it had been ridiculous and over the top and terrible there, the result was that I felt natural writing a much more muted version in "He Was a Beautiful Fiction".
NaNo is great for this kind of experimentation. Knowing that the result is bad is a fantastic license to try new things, things that probably won't work well. I very often deliberately attempt to write things in NaNo that I know I am bad at. I know that I'm reasonably competent at writing dialogue between two people, but when a crowd of people is having a conversation it gets tougher for me to manage all of the dynamics. In "This Novel Takes Place Entirely in the Kitchen" I am slowly having guests to the dinner party show up, so that almost like juggling practice I can transition from writing two people having a conversation to writing three people having a conversation to writing four people having a conversation to writing five people having a conversation. And hopefully this will build up a comfort so that the next time I am writing a story that has a big group conversation, I can just jump in at the deep end with the ten person conversation, having an arsenal of tricks and tools at my disposal learned in this practice session.
I'm pretty sure that as a story it is not very good, but I am enjoying writing it anyway. A fellow NaNoer (I will use the official nomenclature 'WriMo' only when I am in company I am certain will comprehend it) keeps asking me if I think the kitchen is the main character of my story, but though I definitely do like writing the kind of crazy things where the kitchen the main character, I keep demurring to his question. This is a novel about three friends who share an apartment, not a novel about the kitchen, even though the kitchen is the setting that drives the novel.
Nonetheless, there is a lot of terrible food writing littering these pages. If I ever were to try editing this into something I would let other people read, the first order of business would be to actually research reasonable recipes to replace the shit I'm making up off the top of my head as I frantically try to reach wordcount. The recipes I am writing have the look of real recipes, but none of the logic.
The mechanics of writing for NaNoWriMo are not like the mechanics of other writing projects. Word count is king, and quality is your last concern. The trick is to keep forward motion by any means possible, letting momentum keep you from running out of inspiration. So any time you're stuck, you don't stop to think about the best way out of your problem, you write around it. Some people do this by skipping ahead to a part where they're not stuck, and I've sometimes used this technique, but mostly I do it by plowing straight ahead with stalling dialogue until something breaks the logjam.
You fill your writing with redundant adverbs and you repeat things as often as you can get away with. The very odd feeling I have when doing NaNo is that I know what I am writing is terrible, and I am constantly making little mental notes in my head not to use the technique I am using in NaNo for other things.
Despite this, I don't feel like I get many bad writing habits from NaNo. When I wrote "He Was a Beautiful Fiction," the comments keyed in on the way I switched narrative modes seamlessly twice, and I realized that I'd done this because it felt right, because I had experimented with such stylistic jumps in my 2010 NaNo "The Great American Metanovel" and even though it had been ridiculous and over the top and terrible there, the result was that I felt natural writing a much more muted version in "He Was a Beautiful Fiction".
NaNo is great for this kind of experimentation. Knowing that the result is bad is a fantastic license to try new things, things that probably won't work well. I very often deliberately attempt to write things in NaNo that I know I am bad at. I know that I'm reasonably competent at writing dialogue between two people, but when a crowd of people is having a conversation it gets tougher for me to manage all of the dynamics. In "This Novel Takes Place Entirely in the Kitchen" I am slowly having guests to the dinner party show up, so that almost like juggling practice I can transition from writing two people having a conversation to writing three people having a conversation to writing four people having a conversation to writing five people having a conversation. And hopefully this will build up a comfort so that the next time I am writing a story that has a big group conversation, I can just jump in at the deep end with the ten person conversation, having an arsenal of tricks and tools at my disposal learned in this practice session.
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Date: 2013-11-15 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-15 04:32 pm (UTC)