Words and Pictures

[tamaranth]

How I wish I had a functional camera*: it's such a glorious frosty morning here. Red-leaved hedgerows under frost, smoke drifting from chimneys like blue chiffon, syrupy sunshine.

Nanowrimo is going well. It's halfway through the month and I should be halfway through the 50K: in fact I'm a couple of thousand words ahead of that, though it feels like much more because of losing 4 days to migraine.

I do think my writing habits are especially well-suited to a project like this. In the past I've had difficulty writing short stories, because I prefer to write a 'block' of fiction start to finish without interruptions. Quite a few of my stories consist of a single block that's thousands of words long -- requiring hours of uninterrupted writing time.

Longer pieces, novellas and novels or even multi-part, multi-POV stories,are easier. I tend to write in scenes rather than in chapters, and my basic unedited scene is usually about a thousand words long. I can (and do) write a thousand words in under an hour (though I may eventually spend more than an hour editing it) which means I can produce a building-block of plot before I get out of bed, and another (theoretically) at lunchtime, and another between getting home and heading for the pool ...

Yesterday evening I felt very lethargic, so shelved plans to write and to swim and curled up by the fire with a notebook, scribbling chapter notes. This was almost as good as Morning Pages for getting the creative flow going again. When I write a scene I have a pretty good idea of what happens in it: when I scribble outlines I'm playing, and last night I came up with some pretty good ideas about what happens in the next 10K.

So -- fellow Nano writers, how're you doing? what works for you? and is there a better word than 'block' for 'unit of writing output'?

* still waiting for Fuji to send the copy of the original 'we're giving you an upgrade' letter so I can exchange my current camera, filled with Barcelona sand, for a new shiny one.

Comments

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

will it be long enough for a loaner to be useful? sand is a pain...

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I'm rather hoping to get it sorted by the weekend! but if you have one spare, could I possibly impose on you to send it to me anyway, as backup? (If you're happy with that drop me email at tamaranth at gmail and I'll give you werk address ...)

[elinor.livejournal.com]

So -- fellow Nano writers, how're you doing?

Well, not as well as I'd hoped, but at least I've written something. I never expected to 'win' Nano; I'm not a fast writer and I find it hard to write every day when I'm doing other things too.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I think the 'writing every day' is what helps me most -- the more I do it, the easier it gets. Whether or not I hit the target wordcount, it keeps the story alive. (And that's what I missed most when I wasn't writing.)