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| Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? |
Hey Wrimos!
So, it’s day 2. Well, day 2 was last night, but never mind that. How’d it go? Did you have fun? That’s the most important thing.
NaNoWriMo is usually the best thing to spark your creative gears and make writing “fun” again. Sometimes it is far too easy to get caught up in things like, whether you spelled that right or if X,Y, Z actually exists in your fantasy world and if there’s actual documentation and tada, you’re successfully off track and off chasing down a plot thread you don’t really need to be worrying about.
One of the most common “stuck points” this early in NaNoWriMo usually has to do with either your internal editor or your restlessness on simply sitting down and hammering the words out.
Hmm.
So what do you do?
Well, what I do is buckle down and find a few wordsprints I can get involved in. If there aren’t any takers at the moment, then I fill a cup of with steaming hot tea and I write until the temperature is “drinkable”. Surprisingly, I type more in those little short bursts than I might sitting all day in front of the computer screen.
If your editor is giving you a headache, then turn off your spellcheck and grammarcheck in your writing program. If you have to stare at the screen, change your text and screen colors to the same so you can’t see what you’re writing, but you can see that you’re making progress.
Some folks like to use Dr. Wicked’s writing lab, Write or Die. If it helps, us it. Make the most of the tools available to you during NaNoWriMo. Talk to your ML. Get in touch with your fellow wrimos. Check out the NaNoWriMo videos and peptalks.
Then when you’ve spent a nice chunk of time on it, sit down, put your hands on the keyboard and start writing. For all you know, if you don’t write out a few hundred words or so of pure rambly junk, you can’t get to that really emotional scene with the action-packed fight about to happen.
Give yourself a break. It’s the first weekend. There’s plenty of time and plenty of options.
Happy nanoing!
~Sara
Word count from last night: 11,290.