Okay, so I failed NaNoWriMo (I know there’s still three days to go so I’ll keep writing till the deadline, and then beyond). Can I make my excuses now? Only joking. Am I gutted? No, well maybe a little but I think the only negative to me loosing NaNo is the fact that I did not hit the fifty thousand words. So what are the positives that I’m taking from NaNo I hear you ask. I REALLY want to be a writer, which I covered in A previous post so I wont regurgitate that.
- I NEED TO LEARN HOW TO PLAN. This is a big one for me. When I write I tend to write and see what happens. I NEVER plan out how the story will pan out which works okay when I am writing a short story but when its something of novel length that just is not going to work.
- RESEARCH. I can’t research. I start looking into things online and after about an hour my eyes glaze over and that’s it. My granddad recently gave me a lot of books mainly about war which I am going to be getting into reading once NaNo is over. I’m also thinking that maybe doing my research on a sunday when I’ve not been at work all day may be a good idea.
- PACING. I’m figuring that once I’ve got how to plan out my work I’ll be able to sort the pacing out.
- CHARACTERS This is a big one. In the novel that I am co-writing (rewriting) we have a lot of characters who are rather similar to each other so creating more diverse characters is needed. I do think that working on short stories has helped there.
- READING MORE. I do need to read more. There are so many novels out there that I really want to delve into and I think that it’ll help. I may get hold of some audio books as I have the time to listen to them while I’m at work which will lighten the reading load.
- WRITE MORE. My old goal was a thousands words a week., NaNo taught me that I can do that with my hands tied behind my back and my eyes closed. So I’m thinking of a five thousand word a week target will be more challenging. This is something that NaNo had taught me, it doesn’t have to be good. I just need to be writing and I can edit it later.
In December I want to expand on my christmas story that I wrote last year, I’ve got some damn good ideas for this little story and I’ve got a short story that I’ve got to edit. I want to start digging up the information that I need for the novel re-write. I hear author’s saying that they spend months on research so I don’t need to try to learn all that I need to in one day. Once I know what I need to find I can look into finding out these little details that will make the story work. Maybe working on short stories will help with this as well because it’s learning on a smaller scale.
I’m off to bed so I’m fresh for the morning.
[…] part in building that word count and taught me a lot about my writing and where I want it to go ( https://petergermany.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/looking-back-at-nanowrimo/ ) click the link to take you to a post where I talk about NaNo and what I […]
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