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

[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.)