McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
NaNoWriMo anyone?
Kali:
Well, now I'm VERY happy I managed to get 10k on Sunday. Today, I barely cleared the 1667 daily word count, and tomorrow will probably be worse. I just can't write at night, after doing everything I have to do. My brain doesn't cooperate. I had hoped to be at 12,500 tonight but my synapses not only aren't firing, they're sitting back in their La-Z-Boys with beer and Chee-tohs.
So it looks like I will indeed be doing the majority of my writing on the weekends. If I can do at least 1400 - 1500 on weekdays, I'll be content with that and will then push hard on the weekends.
KevinEvans:
I am using a trick from Brandon Sanderson (You knew he was an associate Professor teaching creative writing, right ;) )
He says to consider your story a map, and to plant a sequence of guidepost across it. use each guide post to tell an important part of the story.
In the Na-No world setup, I try to finish a guide post a night. Each one has been averaging 2000+ words and the twenty five stops each provide a solid start and end to a writing session.
4905 words to date (not counting the 5600 setup work) but tonight is a sub arc that need more length, gotta put my head down and start slogging.
Writing as Gunns in NM Albuquerque,
Kevin
Kris_W:
Up at 5975 now, although it's after midnight so I guess that's day three.
Here's my synopsis -
Lillianna successfully thwarts what she imagines is the first step to a forced marriage, but in doing so, destroys the lives of the man she seduces and the woman who loves him. She is banished from her family’s metropolitan estate to live with an aunt in an austere academic community. Her narcissist attitudes erode as she’s caught in the intrigues surrounding unimaginably ancient artifacts and first contact with galactic civilization.
Favorite line today -
Lillianna slumped back in her chair. “People get really over excited about such little things.”
KevinEvans:
Well the system is still working,
up to 8909, the sub arc is done, and the solution involved chelation.
Regards,
Kevin
Kali:
I've decided I've been too hard on female urban fantasy writers and their penchant for romance plot lines. It had gotten bad enough that I began to complain that women were evidently incapable of writing without romance either being the main point of the story, or at least as important as the ostensible central plot.
But now I need a subplot. My story's going well, actually. I'm at just over 18k, I have a good daily word count (around 3k yesterday!) but I'm feeling that it's all a little too ... linear somehow. I sat and stared at where I'd left off. The cops have just delivered their warning, the werewolves are off doing their thing, it's daylight so the vampire's asleep, Rachel's alone in her shop, and I thought "This is where the subplot should begin."
Only I don't have one. And the first thing that occurred to me? Re-writing a bit to start a romance with the male cop.
NO! Bad Kali! So now I'm thinking that so many people use romance because it's easy. They're built around emotion, so you can get immediate involvement with the reader. They come with a whole host of built-in complications, and they can easily tangle your main plot into something more thorny and knotty. So NaNo has given me a whole new perspective on the prevalence of romance in urban fantasy. In recognition whereof I donated $25 to NaNo. It was worth it.
Instead of starting in on a romance, I took Rachel off to the Catholic church to get some holy water, and gave her a crush on a very nice Roman Catholic priest. That should shut 'er up for awhile.
Today should be a busy day at work, so I'm not sure I'll have time to daydream up a new plotline, but I gotta come up with something.
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