My NaNoWriMo Plan for 2011
NoNoWriMo approaches!
I first participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) a couple of years ago. I did pretty well for about 15 days then stalled out. It’s hard. I admire anyone who can actually crank out 50,000 words in a month. I made it to about 24,000. Here’s the thing. Twenty-four thousand words toward a novel is a pretty good start!
So I have a plan for this year. It’s not exactly in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, but I am going to use the event to spur me closer to completion of that project. I am not going to start from scratch and try to pump out 50 kilowords in a month. My plan is to pick up where I left off and get closer to completion of the one I started. If I do at least as well as I did last time, I’ll make to 50,o00. And, if I by some miracle actually do get the full output, I’ll have about 75,000. That will be tantalizingly close to my target word count for the book, which is 80,000 words.
Sure it mostly sucks (I’ve read it), but in the tangle of verbiage there is the kernel of a decent idea for a story, some tolerable plot twists, and an occasional really good sentence. Maybe this is a stupid way to write a novel (in fact it almost certainly is), but what the heck. I’ve got 24,000 words of something and that is the most I have ever produced on a single story line. I’m going to take the shotgun, pedal to the metal approach to it’s logical conclusion. When I hit my target, I’ll do my best to edit the bugeezus out of it and actually make it work.
I read the other day that Earnest Hemingway one said (or wrote) “Write drunk. Edit sober”. That seems like rather excellent advice. I consider this sort of like that except I plan to “Write stupid. Edit smart.”
October 20, 2011
Tags: fiction, NaNoWriMo, novels, speed writing Posted in: Odds & Ends
2 Responses
“Write drunk, edit sober” sounds good, but the problem is that it’s not by Hemingway. The quote is all over the internet being attributed to EH, but no one ever gives a source in Hemingway’s works or conversations. This is because the quote is almost certainly by a novelist called Peter De Vries. He published a novel called “Reuben, Reuben” in 1964, where the main character is based on a famous drunkard poet, Dylan Thomas. On page 242 the character says this:
“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”
http://www.google.co.uk/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=%22sometimes+i+write+drunk+and+revise+sober%22&btnG=
The book is out of print I think, and I only found the quote because it was quoted at that link in The Writer in 1966. Oddly enough, some people online attribute the quote to Dylan Thomas, again without giving a source in Thomas. They don’t realise that they are quoting the words a novelist put in the mouth of a character based on Thomas. Occasionally the quote is attributed to Mark Twain, again without a source. I have no idea why people attribute it to Hemingway, since there is no source for it. Hemingway is a famous name, so the quote spreads like wildfire because of that I suppose. However, there is no source in Hemingway’s works or conversations, so it’s not his quote unfortunately.
Nice analysis. Thanks.
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