#nanowrimo stuff

[avo-kat]

oof, its november.

nano time!

anyway, once again im realizing the worst about writing is having to name characters. and places. ugh.

also i spend too much time looking for names and researching pronouns, but im still undecided, so im going with they for now, which means i will be sticking to they because ill get used to it and then wont want to change it.

[caspercryptid]

Hello everyone I am so unbelievably pissed about the NaNoWriMo situation that i'm going to take my massive stack of writing and craft books and my English degree and channel all my rage into making an email newsletter to send craft-oriented writing prompts and tips during the month of November. Say No to NaNoWriMo, but yes to WriMo. You get it.

I'm not going to make this have the same goals as Nanowrimo-- I'm not reskinning it but less ableist, I just really think having a whole month where people focused on their work is pretty cool and I want to keep up that spirit. This is going to be informal and run by Just Me, though I'll make a discord server if it's clear there's interest. Direct questions to @nowrimomo , which I literally just made and so will look like a skeleton currently.

I'm going to include prompts from various professional sources with options for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Fanfic, so everybody can get in on this. It doesn't matter what you write, but we should all Write More.

[novlr]

Have you ever tried to write a novel in 24 hours?

Join us for the 24-Hour Novel Challenge!

This year, from June 15th to 17th, writers from all over the world will come together to attempt a 50k draft in 24 hours over the weekend.

We want you to do this challenge in a way that looks and feels accessible to you as an individual. If 24 hours in one go doesn’t suit you, feel free to tackle it in more manageable chunks over the weekend.

A single 24-hour session, two lots of 12 hours, or 24 lots of 1-hour blocks; it’s up to you! The only rule is that you need to write for 24 hours between the 15th and 17th of June.

Curious to learn more? The event's founder is here to tell us all about it in the Reading Room today.

[haridraws]

A dead thing surrounded by dead things

[albatris]

nanowrimo out-of-context

sorry about the different-sized fonts idk what I'm doing 😎✌

[so-many-ocs]

(voice of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about) as a writer you must don many hats. for example right now i am a car guy. coolant leaks amirite fellas

[dao-the-starlight]

Cross your fingers this post actually shows up on the damn tags 🤞

Hello Our Life fans! This is a sort of weird post and I’m hoping this doesn’t break any Tumblr etiquette or something, but I just wanted to gauge something

I’ve had ideas of some long OL fics (1 or olba, 1 or olnf) that are AU type things, one being a Ghibli inspired fantasy and the other a horror/supernatural mystery, and I’m curious if anyone is actually interested in reading them so I thought I’d post the synopsis for each fic and see if anyone’s interested via interaction!

Here’s each synopsis (sorry they’re both long as hell)

I wrote these both a little while ago, so these are kinda subject to change, but that’s the basic gist of each plot! (Yes I’m aware the OLNF one is just stranger things that was the main inspo)

P.S. If I end up deciding to go through with turning these into proper fic series and posting them, uh don’t expect my posting schedule to be even a little bit regular- I have quite a bit of stuff going on irl and I’m really bad at balancing my tasks, so this is just gonna be on a “I work on it when I work on it” kind of project

[lavendershowcase]

Since NaNo has been a hot mess for a hot minute and can't seem to stop digging their own grave--

Why doesn't writblr all go hard sharing and reading each other's works in November? Post our own challenges for each other, tips, support, etc. Nothing formally organized or planned, just an agreed upon month of support and doing out best.

[sincerely-sofie]

GUYS. BETTER THE WOOL JUST HIT 50K WORDS!!!!!!!

[veryrealauthorthings]

[uwudonoodle]

Writeblr: "NoNoWriMo are sell outs. Let's cancel them!"

Me, who is brand new to writing, thinking it was just an activity people chose to do, much like making a New Year's Resolution: "It's an organization...? With like money and stuff???"

[greenieart]

Finally done with the fullbodies for all three of these characters for a new project! I’ve been working on these designs for the last couple of months, and I’m super fond of them and excited to write more about them 💚

[topazadine]

How to Build a Sustainable Writing Habit Through SCIENCE (Fuck Off, NaNoWriMo)

This is a lightly edited repost from a previous post on my mostly-defunct blog, topazadine.com. I feel like it's an excellent thing to highlight now that everyone's wondering what the hell do to after NaNoWriMo showed their ass as anti-creative idiots.

I have never liked NaNoWriMo and think, frankly, that it is a garbage tool for new writers. If you've done it and enjoyed it, that's great, but overall, it is not the best way to build motivation. At all.

But why is NaNoWriMo so bad? (Other than the current controversy.)

It encourages younger writers to think of writing as something they do during the months of October through November. Not something they do all year round, day in and day out. People will prep for weeks to do a whole novel in one month and hinge all their writerly hopes on that one singular month.

We won't even get into the fact that November is the absolute shittiest month to try to get a novel done because the holidays are coming up, and many working-class people are busting their asses off to get extra hours in before Christmas.

Writing is something you do all. the. time. It is not bound by a singular month. It is not limited to a certain time of year. And when you are working to complete a draft, it doesn't matter season it is. What matters is that you get it done.

So let me show you something better. But first, why should you listen to me? And why is my method an improvement over a shitty organization's AI-riddled contest?

I wrote the first draft of my novel, Poesy (104,323 words) in 39 days.

That’s an average of 2,647 words per day. It is also about twice as much as the typical person aims for during NaNoWriMo. I did not set out to get it done in any given time period, but I still completed way, way more than NaNoWriMo would require in just about the same amount of time (plus 9 days).

I didn't have a buddy group. I didn't have checkins. I just had me and my keyboard and my secret weapon, which I'll show you in a bit.

How is it possible to get so much more done without that external motivator?

Simple: I compete with myself.

You Need to Develop Intrinsic Motivation

What in the world is intrinsic motivation?

Intrinsic motivation is defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence. When intrinsically motivated, a person is moved to act for the fun or challenge entailed rather than because of external products, pressures, or rewards. Frontiers in Neurobiotics

That is, in essence, what we do when we’re writing for fun; or, rather, it should be what we’re doing when we write for fun.

A lack of intrinsic motivation is why people who see novels as a get-rich-quick scheme tend to burn out when they realize that most writers make less than minimum wage. That's called extrinsic motivation, and it doesn't work well for things like writing, where there may not be any easily-defined goals or motivators. Most of us are not going to become rich from our writing.

Here's why extrinsic motivation is unhelpful:

Extrinsic motivation does not always work best; sometimes it can make us perform poorly at certain tasks. For instance, studies reveal that high stake rewards, like cash bonuses, can hinder cognitive capacity. This happens because they shift our focus away from the task and onto the outcome. We can become preoccupied with rewards and all the things that come with them, such as our social status, instead of just doing the work. Extrinsic rewards also tend to narrow our focus on a defined goal and reduce our ability to see other possibilities, hindering creativity. Studies find people perform worse on tasks requiring imagination and ingenuity when they are offered extrinsic rewards, such as higher pay. Nir and Far

And, well, note that "performing worse on tasks requiring imagination and ingenuity." Extrinsic motivation is literally the WORST motivator for writing specifically.

NaNoWriMo is extrinsic motivation, which is not anywhere near as powerful or sustaining as intrinsic motivation. You want to get the shiny achievement award, so you just bang out 50,000 words of slop because you want to say you did it.

You're not motivated by anything but the outcome. That does not a sustainable writing practice make.

But there’s something about intrinsic motivation I want to highlight, because it’s crucial to what I am about to show you: the challenge.

Sometimes writing is a total slog because we’re worrying about all the other things and not on the words themselves. We’re fussing about whether we will ever get published, if we’ve added enough tension in a certain part, if our mom is going to read our porn and realize what a freak they raised.

You cannot think about those things while actively writing.

Instead, you need to focus on the writing process itself. John Schinnerer, a psychologist and life coach, explains further:

Remember as you are in the process of achieving your goals that the enjoyment comes from the doing not the attaining. It is important to find contentment in the act of pursuing the goal while placing less weight on the actual fulfillment of the goal itself.  PsychCentral

So we know you need to find the challenge fun, and you need to focus on the act of putting the words on the page.

In other words, you need to make it a contest with yourself. Here’s how.

Use a Word Count Spreadsheet

Finally! We get to why I’m telling you this! It's free, it's easy, it can be done all year round.

A daily word count spreadsheet is an amazing way to stay motivated and to keep pushing yourself to write because you can literally see the wins rack up. Every day, the word count jumps significantly, which can be much more motivating than just “oh, I’m at 8,453 words.”

More importantly, you’ll start to want to beat your ��high score” from the day before.

I’ve highlighted one of the cells so that you can see the simple formula that you need to set up: it’s just yesterday’s count minus today’s count.

Put that in one cell, then click and drag the bottom righthand corner of the cell, and it will populate the rest of the cells in that column with the adjusted formula (B4-B3, and so on).

This is very easy to create. All you have to do is copy-paste the wordcount from your document into your spreadsheet, make sure you have that super-simple formula, and you're done. I have severe dyscalculia and can still use it.

But you can see how much this really helped me:

Things started to really ramp up right at the end because I was getting so motivated by the word counts of the day previous. I wanted to beat yesterday’s high score and keep going.

At the beginning, I was writing maybe 1.9k words; by the end, I was an absolute demon, regularly breaking over 2.8k and then some. On the last day, when the rest of the family was in a post-Christmas hangover, my butt was glued to my chair, banging out those last few thousand words.

Psychologists and life coaches agree that self-competition, a type of intrinsic motivation, is one of the best ways to improve.

Michelle Gibbings, a workplace expert, explains:

When you compete with yourself, you don’t become fixated on what other people are doing; you set the direction and speed. You put yourself in the driver’s seat and control your progress, setting meaningful goals rather than focusing on the progress of others. Michelle Gibbings

Making a word count spreadsheet like this is the definition of setting your own speed and controlling your progress. You can decide on a threshold you always want to hit and then feel very satisfied when you go beyond that.

I set my threshold at 1.5k words every day so that I didn’t feel bummed out when I had an off day and couldn’t get a lot done, but I really wanted my average to be around 2k, so I’d periodically check how close I was to that. If I had a terrible day or was busy, then I’d want to make up for lost time and write more the next day so I kept my average.

Now, I live a life that is quite advantageous to consistent writing: I’m single, I’m childless, I work from home, and most of my hobbies are pretty low-key.

Your life doesn’t look like mine, and that’s totally okay.

There’s no need to match the speed I showed here.

What matters is that your schedule works for you, and that you are consistent.

If you’re a caretaker or have a strenuous job, then set your threshold at just 100 words and aim for an average of 500. However, you’ll be sad if your spreadsheet has a blank cell, so you’ll want to get down at least something, even if you only have 15 minutes to write.

Plus, it’s so encouraging to see the word count go up day by day: much more satisfying than just seeing it in tiny font at the bottom of a Word document or Google Doc.

Or getting some dumb t-shirt from an organization that is actively trying to murder creativity for commercial gain. (Oh, and they protected an actual pedophile from consequences for months on end while he continued to groom children. But that was last year's controversy.)

There’s another reason why this particular method works so well for writers, though.

Word Counts Banish the Urge to Edit

You know you shouldn’t, but you do it anyway. A single word here. A removed sentence there.

The first draft is just about getting everything out, not fixing everything that needs fixing. That part comes later during your five billion revisions where you tweak every single word.

Revising means you have less to work with, which means you have less development. You can get rid of anything that shouldn’t be there when you’ve gotten to that very satisfying “The End” page.

If you are motivated by the spreadsheet method, then you are screwing yourself over if you edit.

Your word count went down! It looks like you did less than you did! You’re losing! Best add more, and fast!

(I had to include my placeholder chapter names; it was obligatory.)

Use strikethrough! Now you know exactly what you’ll be getting rid of when you get to the end of your draft, but you’re not decimating your word count. I removed the entire beginning of the book; that scene is super cute, though, so I later turned it into its own one-shot on my AO3 page.

I prefer doing that because then, if you find that you actually wanted to keep that scene or move it elsewhere, all you have to do is copy-paste from the old version, remove the strikethrough, and you’re all good.

So that’s my tool. It’s really that simple.

But even though it’s so simple, it works wonders for your motivation and consistency, which are crucial for a good writer.

Are you going to give it a whirl? You may find it nervewracking at first, but I encourage you to sample this method, especially if you have a hard time getting motivated.

And if you enjoyed this article, maybe you'll consider purchasing my debut novel, 9 Years Yearning.

This is not the book I drafted last year; it is in fact a prequel of sorts to that first novel. However, it helps set the scene for Poesy (the sixth book in the Eirenic Verses) so that you'll be all prepped for the masterpiece.

9 Years Yearning is a coming of age romance that follows the life of two young soldiers as they go from sorta-enemies, to frenemies, to friends, and then finally to lovers. It is a short read; you can probably finish it in about 2 hours all the way through. Perfect for a weekend romp.

If you do read my book, please don't forget to leave a review!

Reviews are essential to success on Amazon as they boost visibility. (Yes, even bad ones.) Always leave reviews, no matter how short, to support indie authors!

[roughdraftmonth]

What's your Rough Draft Month goal? Are you climbing to the top of a 60,000 word mountain? Hiking through a forest of 50,000 words? Maybe you're chasing a waterfall to the 30,000 word finish line or traversing a moonlight path as a lone wolf with a flexible goal. No matter what your goal is, we've got a map to guide you on your way. Set your goal and choose your trail.

Make sure to join your trail's leaderboard on Trackbear!

Trackbear Join Codes: 🗻 Mountain (60,000 words): 74d0d9e9-95bd-4845-9d72-6f94f22ad3cd 🌳 Forest (50,000 words): 5469a86e-198c-495f-9079-79e9200194ba 🌊 Waterfall (30,000 words): 190f5737-4801-42e0-a265-f3abafaa764b 🌙 Moonlight (Flex Goal): 6e2d3176-6bf4-4665-bad6-f77b8fdc72d1

You can also share what trail you've chosen with one of our graphics. Make sure to tag us and use #RDMO24!

[ultra-violetra]

one of the things I would love to make is a writer's bootcamp / critique circle where people get grouped together based on things like genre, age category, writing stage (i.e. outlining, 1st draft, editing) where you submit something weekly to show your progress and get critique or even just positivity from your group. and there would be deadlines to encourage accountability and getting. stuff. done.

is there interest in this? would anyone want to help me make something like it? i don't think I could do it on my own

edit: if you'd like to join, click here

[lovesick-girly]

starting to prep for camp nanowrimo. outlining will be the death of me.