NaNoWriMo November 2012: ADVICE

NaNoWriMo is coming November 1st. And I'm here to help you get your novel done before December 1st.

First off, before the event begins, you'll want to write down a plot. It can be just a simple list of things behind the story or an entire 70-sheet notebook filled up entirely with the story.

Secondly, if you have a busy schedule, put in 1-2 hours of writing every day.

Thirdly, if you are on the YWP site, be sure that you have set your goal.

When the event is going on, take the steps I'm about to give you. It's important not to burn yourself out when writing. If you are feeling worn out by your writing or can't seem to write for the time being, take a break and get back to it later. Usually a short walk around your neighborhood could do.

How to complete the challenge in a simple way:

If you are on the adult website, the word count goal is automatically 50,000 words. If you are on the YWP website, you can set your own goal.

Divide your word count goal by 30. Whatever your result is is the amount of words you have to write per day. I'll just call it your daily word count goal in this post.

Next, find out how much time to fit into your day to write. Do this by taking a typing test. You can find them online. Divide your daily word count goal by the amount of words per minute that you can type, and that is how many minutes it would take to get your daily word count goal done.

HOWEVER, you will also want to tack on 30 - 60 extra minutes to that amount of minutes, because sometimes you might type something out and you decide to change it, you will probably make frequent typos, etc. Mistakes and quick edits will add up the amount of time you have to take to write.

---
EXAMPLE:

Let's say your goal for the month is 50,000 words. So you would do the math: 50,000 divided by 30. You wound end up with a decimal number, but just round it up to the nearest one. You'd get 1,667.

Next, let's say a typing test says you type 30 words per minute. You divide 1,667 by 30 and get a number with decimals, but you round it to 56. So. 56 minutes to get to 1,667, but then there will be extra time taken with fixing errors and all, so add another hour.

In total, you'd have to take 2 hours every day to get your 1,667 daily words done.
---

Hope this advice helps!

---------

My history of NaNoWriMo:

When I first heard about NaNoWriMo almost a year ago, it was already 3 days into NaNoWriMo, but I did it anyways. I got past my goal of writing a 30,000-word novel. In August this summer I did a 50,000-word novel in Camp NaNoWriMo.

I'm about to write my third NaNoWriMo novel, called "Derrick And Fame." My word count goal is 50,000 words. You can find me on the YWP NaNoWriMo website as Gillman329.

Four Large Bears and the Possessive Noun

Some of you may know what it's like to read a sentence that has an apostrophe error in it. That some of you may understand how it's so annoying to read a sentence that uses the possessive form of a noun or pronoun when there's no apostrophe needed.

Example: Martin was shocked to see four large bear's sitting at the table.

Bear's is possessive. An apostrophe is added to make the noun possessive. You could talk about a bear who owns an archive full of honey and say that it's the "bear's honey archive." Archive belongs to bear. You could talk about a den that belongs to a bear and call it the "bear's den." Den belongs to bear.

But did the author mean to use "bear's" as a possessive noun or the plural form of a noun?

Remember that a possessive noun is a noun showing ownership or relationship, and is often used as an adjective telling whose.

Martin was shocked to see four bears. In the example sentence above, "bear's" is not showing ownership or relationship. It is not being used as an adjective that tells whose. This is because there isn't any other noun or pronoun in the sentence that belongs to a single bear. There is no ownership or relationship between a bear and another noun or pronoun.

Bear's is supposed to be plural and have no apostrophe, because an apostrophe is not used to make the plural form of a noun.

So, the author (me) should have written "bears," since an "s" (or another small number of letters) is often added for the plural form of a noun.

So the sentence corrected is: Martin was shocked to see four large bears sitting at the table.

(Another note, if we were going to use bear's as a possessive noun, we would actually stick the apostrophe at the end [think Martin was shocked to see four large bears' mates sitting at the table].)

Typing Faster = Getting Wordcount Done Quickly

The writing tip for today is basically that typing correctly (without looking at the keyboard and having your fingers in the correct positions) can really help you in writing faster, especially with NaNoWriMo. Typing with two or three fingers will just make that seem much more slowly. I took typing lessons when I was only around ten years old.

For some of you, I'm sure you've learned already how to type right.

If you haven't already:

Find a reliable book with typing exercises, or look online for one. Regularly take an online typing test. It'll definitely help you with writing faster, and making capital letters faster and easier. And it will help you with NaNoWriMo.

Writing Wrace 4000: Who's Participating?

I'll be hosting an online writing even probably next month, and I want to know who is interested in participating.

Basically, it's a one-day even where everyone will have to write a 4000-word story. I'm still working out the details on what the exact competition type is, but I'll get more details out soon.

Are you interested? Let me know in comments!

Camp NaNoWriMo: Writing Fast?

In the past couple of days, my writing has slowed down to a little bit over 1,600 words per day, the regular average words-per-day for Camp NaNoWriMo. The reason being is that I have been writing all the planned parts of the story, the parts that I planned to happen, and I didn't know I'd get to the part where my main character ends up where the climax happens at only 20,000 out of 50,000 words, and I even began to get a bit tired of writing.

!!!!

What if this happens to you? What if your story is so fast-paced that you've gotten close the climax halfway through the novel? Do what I'm doing!

I'm making things up along the way. Creating a bit more suspense and tension. The next half of my novel, except probably the climax, will be a part that was never really written down. It'll be fun.

So, just a tip on what you can do.

An Overused "Then"

One of my earlier posts was on how you want to limit adverbs. For me, adverbs can be unavoidable.

Just very recently, in my Camp NaNoWriMo novel for this month, I felt like I was using "then" a lot. So I did a word search and found over 80 results. Over 80! I couldn't believe it! 80 of the words in my novel were "then!"

So I looked for each "then" and found that a lot of them were unnecessary. I spent a few minutes cutting back on them and managed to get them down to around 40.

This same problem, except with the adverb "suddenly," happened with my November 2011 NaNoWriMo novel.

Remember: Adverbs are okay to use in writing, but limit them. Also, you can use them in dialogue.

(Hey, why not play a fun game. Find all the adverb from this post and copy them into a comment.)

Writing Wrace 4000

Get the drumroll ready. For I have an exciting announcement.

Coming up August 20th is: WRITING WRACE 4000!!

It is the first writing contest/challenge that I'm making. I am will keep you up-to-date on this event by writing occasional posts. Eventually, I will give you full information on what's happening in the event. All I'm saying is that it's a writing challenge where people compete, and it will happen every so often.

Stay tuned.