Thursday Thirteen: NaNo Lessons

 

13 Things I Learned During NaNoWriMo

1. Priorities are important — especially when you have multiple projects all due by Nov 30th.

2. The month of October is for planning, start EARLIER than Oct 31st.

3. I definitely need a road map/game plan. This plan needs to be extremely more detailed. Lord SO_N_SO is not sufficient to get a grasp of his true character. Luckily, this was not the hero, but that little piece of cardboard was whispering that he’d like to apply for the job someday.

4. Progress is progress. Any progress is good.

5. My mornings are usually more productive than evenings, although a couple of my best runs were from 10-midnight after the kids were in bed.

6. I work better when someone else is working too — I knew this, it was just reinforced in Live Chat on Romance Divas. This is especially true when I’m not quite in the mood to be working. Getting 10 words down and knowing someone else is working against the same clock goes along way to finding motivation.

7. I can write 2-3k words a day when I put my mind to it — however my journaling and blogging and real life suffered for it. My kids & homework do not mix well during writing time. I need to teach them the benefits of #6. Martial Arts class time, however, was good for working on notes on paper.

8. It is possible to stuff my internal editor in a box for extended periods of time. I still haven’t really stopped to go back and read what I’ve written, except to ramp up for the next session. I will admit to some fiddling, but I noticed that I was zapping words instead of adding new sentences — not good for NaNo.

9. Peter Gabriel’s Passion CD is great for background noise. The rhythms build throughout and help keep the momentum going. Stomp — the found instrument percussion group — is also good for background music.

10. I need a wider variety of instrumental music in my iTunes. Lyrics distract me much more easily.

11. I’m more comfortable with letting conversation flow and then going back and filling in action beats and internal dialogue later. Long passages of descriptive narrative were often more like torture, especially if it was internal reflection about some deep emotional issue.

12. I was more comfortable in my heroine’s head, especially when she’s reacting to the off-stage hero.

13. I had a lot of fun doing this even though I won’t “win” with only 35,856 words still. It was a lot of work, but it was another form of a puzzle for me. Must. Solve. Puzzle. Having my spreadsheet that took Dunne’s Emotional Structure and Vogler’s Writer’s Journey diagrams and smushed them all together really made it easy to see where the patterns needed to go. Having that based on page numbers also felt like it helped me with pacing. But most importantly, I learned a lot about how my own personal process. I’m going to keep working on this one and then start the process again for the story that comes before this one, only at a much more reasonable pace while I start to unravel the mysteries of the self-editing process.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1 Tempest Knight	2 Ava Rose Johnson	3 Gina	4 Susan Helene Gottfried
5 Heather	6 Carrie Lofty	7 Ember Case	8 Alice Audrey

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