Category: Writing

My laptop crashes sometimes. After a crash, any attempt to start it up again will result in another crash within 20-30 minutes. The machine absolutely needs a solid eight-ish hours to cool off before it can be used again. Geek Squad opened the thing up for me and confirmed that the fan is working fine, so I don’t even know what the problem here is. What I do know is that if the computer happens to crash while I’m writing for the night, it is not coming back until the morning. As such, Saturday’s total was 8,647 out of 8,334. I’m on target, but only because I doubled up during that write-in at the library on Friday. I’m worried these crashes might become more frequent. I anticipated this might be a problem and have been writing in Google docs, so I can access the draft from a library machine if need be, but being forced to write only on library hours could be a serious impediment.

There was a write-in in my town today, where a bunch of NaNo folks go to the library, commandeer a room, and just write for like four hours. This is a very productive writing atmosphere, because my laptop’s unstable and will crash if moved while powered on, which means I can’t get out of a room where my monitor is in plain view of everyone around and I have nude mods installed on every game on my machine up to and including Minesweeper, so I can’t knock off and play video games in the middle of time assigned to writing. Upshot: I’ve got 8,390 words written out of 6,667.

So there’s this website called 750words.com that I have a grandfathered free membership to. You write into their word processor and it tracks how many words you’ve written with the goal being to write 750 words a day. The problem is, it expects you to use their actual word processor, but their word processor is awful. It exports things as .txt files with the line breaks removed and no italics or bold, and digging up previous days’ work in the word processor itself for direct copy/pasting requires using a clunky interface that requires loading a new page every time you want to scroll back a month, so God help you if you’re trying to dig up some stuff you wrote back in 2013. I just use Google docs to write and then copy/paste things into 750 words. The problem with this is that 750 words cuts you off at exactly midnight, which means if I’m writing late at night (as I often am) and realize that the deadline is in two minutes, by the time I’ve logged in, figured out where the last day’s writing left off, and copied all the new words from my main document, the hour has passed and the whole day is marked as zero words. The subsequent day then gets to have doubled up words, so weekly and monthly word output is still recorded accurately, but the actual 750 words per day streak is not. I’m considering switching over to copy/pasting the previous day’s work right after midnight, since getting it in at 12:10 instead of 12:05 won’t ruin everything the way getting it in at 12:00 instead of 11:55 does.

Also, I’m at 5,314 out of 5,000 words today, and the actual word writing got done before midnight (with time to spare), so I’m good on that front.

November second’s total wordcount was, technically, 3,020 out of 3,334. In my defense, I did get myself over the finishline within an hour of midnight. The problem with that metric, of course, is that it might keep me on track for wordcount when I wake up the next morning, but it won’t work on November 30th. When midnight strikes and November ends, I either have 50,000+ words or I don’t.

Yesterday, got up to 1786 out of 1667 words. There was a literal eleventh hour sprint to get it done after I’d spent something like 3-4 hours staring at a blank page and not knowing how to start. I had a full outline and everything. Just didn’t know how to introduce my protagonist.

Quick background for those who aren’t at all involved in the creative writing world: NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It takes place in November, and the idea is that a bunch of writers (mostly aspiring, I think occasionally a small-time published author deigns to the event) get together and provide support and encouragement to one another while attempting to write a 50,000 word complete novel. All kinds of dirty tricks are seen as perfectly valid to make this work, and considering all the dirty tricks I’m pulling to get my “one blog post daily for a year” goal completed, I can’t fault them for that. For example, if a fantasy writer is having trouble, they can add a few hundred words just by doing a find/replace for their main character “Grothnar” and replace it with “Grothnar, son of Grognar.” It’s a rule that the story has to be not only 50,000 words long but also complete by the end of November, which leads to a lot of literary rocks fall everyone dies endings. It’s against the rules to do any writing before or after the month of November and there’s a sort of gentleman’s agreement, I know it when I’ll see it sort of rule against simply copy/pasting huge sections of work over and over again. The border on this is fuzzy, though, because copy/pasting, say, a prophecy every time it’s recited or a song’s lyrics or that “Grothnar, son of Grognar” trick all fall within the purview of dirty tricks that flagging writers are absolutely allowed and encouraged to use if they need it. There’s not a cash prize for winning or anything, so ultimately the rules are whatever the writer says they are, but these ones seem to be mostly agreed upon.

NaNoWriMo is really popular amongst amateur writing circles, so it’s a bit of a big deal to me that it (unintentionally) prizes one writing style over another. Another bit of background: Fiction writing styles can be broadly divided into a spectrum between two opposing types, outline writers and discovery writers. Outline writers create a skeleton in advance and then put meat on the bones, starting with an outline which in extreme cases (the Snowflake Method, for example) will involve scene-by-scene outlining prior to actually writing a single word of the novel. Discovery writers start with a few ideas, and again using an extreme example, might have nothing but a desire to write at all. Different writers find they do their best work on different points of the spectrum. Discovery writers tend to require many drafts and revisions to turn their first draft into a finished work, while outline writers tend to require fewer. I haven’t heard of outline writers who require no revisions at all, but outline writers who require only one or two revisions to get publishable material crop up now and again.

Clever readers will have seen where I’m going with this already: You can’t write actual words during the month of November, but outlines are totally kosher. Outline writers can do a significant chunk of their NaNo in October, but discovery writers can only play around with ideas in their head and wait for them to gel. The further to each extreme a writer gets, the worse this issue is. Someone using the Snowflake Method will walk into NaNoWriMo with a scene-by-scene outline and character profiles with well-plotted arcs. That’s not to say that using the Snowflake Method will give you an advantage in NaNoWriMo, because if that’s not how you write you’ll just be shooting yourself in the foot, driving out the passion needed to sustain such a project. If you happen to be the kind of person who uses the Snowflake Method (or similar), though, you are at an enormous advantage. You never have to waste a moment on what happens next, because you already figured that out. While you might find yourself needing to do some research for specific details you didn’t think would be relevant until you reached them, most of your research is already done. Additionally, since you have a heavy outline, if you’re not feeling one particular scene, you can dash out a 300 word summary of it and move onto the next, and your outline means that later scenes will not be significantly harmed by the incredibly glossed over nature of the earlier scene.

You’ll also have an easier time in March, which is the much less popular National Novel Editing Month, since editing is generally easier (but not to be overlooked) for more outline-heavy writers. There is no NaNoOutMo, so the part of the year where you meticulously outline your novel is entirely shrouded from view. Even if there were a NaNoOutMo (or really, more like National Novel Outlining Weekend, however you’d hipster that down to one word), discovery writers just wouldn’t be participating at all, so they wouldn’t have an easier victory to balance out the outline writer’s NaNoWriMo advantage. Outlining’s like a a third of the work of a heavy outline process, work that gets offloaded into the drafting or editing stage for discovery writers, who must thus cram that work into NaNoWriMo or NaNoEdMo.

I don’t really have a solution and to the extent that NaNoWriMo has a function at all, this isn’t really a big deal anyway. Particularly, since I lean towards outlining (if you look closely at this blog, you can see that a lot of my posts are filling in outlines, and when my buffer tends to dry up, it’s usually because I’ve run out of outlines and need to lay down some more before I can get any more blog content out), this is really just me having an advantage over the other ~60% of the spectrum who lean more towards discovery than I do. Basically this is just an observation without any real point or argument attached to it at all.

EDIT: After making my own attempt at NaNoWriMo this year, I have discovered that NaNoEdMo is still running, but apparently not really? Like, the website has a list of 2017 winners of the challenge, so clearly it’s still a thing, but also the months of January and February are considered a “Now What?” phase where wrimos (I don’t come up with the nickname) figure out what to do with those 50,000 words they wrote last November, and this Now What? thing is facilitated I think on the NaNoWriMo forums and not, like NaNoEdMo, by a separate group on a separate website? Maybe some of the people exit the Now What? phase and go directly into NaNoEdMo? I dunno, guys. I guess we’ll find out in January.