I've been so bad about posting! Mostly because I've been terribly behind on my own wordcount, heh, and now I'm down with the flu to boot. However, after a marathon session during a very quiet night shift (almost 8000 words in seven hours), I'm all caught up.
I have two lesson plans to share that I'll get up tomorrow after I've reflected on them a bit. But I wanted to share three tricks that have been immensely helpful to me over the last few days as I've struggled to catch up to my story.
1) Read a good book.
I know, I know. Thoroughly counter-intuitive. This is Novel WRITING Month, not Reading. Sure, most of us are dedicated fans of some form of literature or another, and especially those who do NaNoWriMo, and/or teach it, must be pretty dedicated to Story with a capital S or they wouldn't be intrigued by this little adventure in creative masochism. But I'm a big believer in the idea that your output is only ever going to be as good as your input. Over the last two days, as I've surged back from a big hole in my wordcount and gotten the story to a place where I feel much more confident about my ability to write all the way to the end, I've also been doing more reading. Not a lot, not the curl-under-the-covers-for-three-hours kind of reading. But I have Robin Mckinley's Dragonhaven and Connie Willis' Passage, both books I love that have significant narrative and thematic connections to my story, sitting next to my computer. And every thousand words, if I want to, I'll take a fifteen minute break and just read a little. I'm always more energized and more full of words when I come back.
2) Write the good stuff first.
I want to stress that this works FOR ME. For many people, almost all NaNoWriMoers, it doesn't. The idea of NaNoWriMo is that, as the King says in Alice In Wonderland, "Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end, then stop." And in previous years I've done that, with mixed results. It's too early to say what my results are now, but I've already written the last 200 or so words of the book, as well as a few choice bits of dialogue from an important scene near the end and I've written the actual moment of the climax (as in, the moment the Ring falls into Mount Doom kind of thing, nothing before or after.) I have these in white text so I don't see them, but they're there, at the end of my document, adding to my wordcount and giving me something very clear to shoot for. This also means that when I'm -- inevitably -- scrambling to get to the end at 11:00 on my last day, I'll hopefully feel a little less tragic about how I can't remember what exactly my protagonist was going to say or what that brilliant metaphor was that I know I had, because that text is already there, written in the (relative) calm of late Week 3, just waiting for me to highlight it and turn it visible again. Which brings me to the third thing that's been working for me...
3) Hide your text.
I'm a pretty decent touch-typer, and so if you're the hunt-and-peck type, this might not work for you, although nothing says you can't keep your eyes on the keyboard. I was trying to get some words in last weekend during a long bus ride back from Bellevue, and, terribly paranoid about someone reading my poor deformed first draft of a novel over my shoulder, I pulled up a new document and changed the text color to ivory. It showed up just enough on the page for me to know where to put my cursor; then I turned my eyes out the window, and proceeded to write about 1500 words that I could not see. This was GREAT for me. It was like Write Or Die (http://writeordie.drwicked.com) without the annoying sounds and panic. My eyes, my mind, all of it were on the scene of the story unfolding inside my imagination, and my fingers were just doing the necessary transcription work. No spellchecking, no grammar fretting, no rereading, no going back to add a better adjective or vary dialogue tags. At the end of my bus ride, I highlighted the whole thing, changed the text to black, and scrupulously saved. Day's wordcount all but done in forty minutes, and I felt good about it too. Of course it was riddled with typos and little red lines and it still wasn't the flawless recreation of the scene in my head I wanted -- but it's NaNoWriMo. And the text was THERE.
Now me and my flu -- and my novel -- are going back to bed. And to end on a joyous note, emails have been pouring in from my weekend students as they finish their novels. You guys unquestionably and definitively rock. Soon I'll have so much to read!
I tried the invisible text idea for a bit--it was funny because I'd just been thinking about it for some reason and then I read your comment on it so I figured I'd really better try it. In my case, near-black on black, and father fun. Hilarious if you forget to turn off spellcheck. I did some minor corrections later (given that I was sharing it with someone else to read) but didn't really go over it closely, so I can only imagine what ort of interesting things I'll find I wrote.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I don't know if it necessarily makes me write freer or faster but it's nice at least to change things up, and I think for that reason it may have pushed out some extra words in a short time frame. And definitely nice, as you say, as a way to ensure people aren't reading over your shoulder. I'm sure no one in the restaurant WAS paying the least attention to me, but it's reassuring to know that if they are, they'll see nothing. (Except some crazy person typing at a laptop with the text turned invisible. Which come to think of it could raise more issues...oh well.)