nano post-mort
Dec. 3rd, 2010 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishSo, Nano.
First: holy cow I did that. 50,000 words in any timeframe is impressive; doing it in a month is... nuts. (And doing 27,000 of those words in ten days is even more nuts.)
And I got lots of cheers and encouragement and 'yay you' from lots and lots of good people, plus an offer of cookies, and a headless fish fromuilos ("maybe someone took the head out to see a movie"), all of which were very heartening and yay.
Scrivener is awesome and I strongly encourage all writers to take a look at it. (The Windows version is in beta right now and is expected to be available for real early next year.) I mostly created one document per scene and labeled them appropriately, which made finding the thing I had been talking about eight days ago ever so much easier than scrolling back through a single file. Plus I could write the ending and not have it dangling off the end of the current document. My only complaint is with the iffy export functionality. It'll save to RTF, but from the quick glance I gave it as I hit 'select-all, copy' to validate my wordcount, it's a pretty hideous RTF. Oh well.
I'm trying not to obsess about the quality of the writing, because I'm deliberately not going back and looking over it for at least another month. Probably longer. And it's not really fair to judge it based on what I thought of it while I was writing. Having said that, I don't think it was very good on the things I'm not instinctively good at (character and description / sense of place felt especially bad), and I'm pretty sure I badly flubbed the Big Emotional Climax. Mostly because I started writing it at about five PM on the 30th, when I'd already been writing for eight hours and I was more interested in making my wordcount than in making it work. On the other hand, the plot mostly holds together, I think.
What I have here is a first draft that was written in full knowledge that it was just a first draft. I don't think I've ever done that before, with anything. It's... freeing. I hope it'll be even more so when I go back and look at it and it turns out to be 'bad, but not as bad as i remember.' If I can write a thousand words a day of fixable-quality prose, I'm in good shape.
And... now I miss the feeling of sitting down to write. Writing for work isn't the same, not now when work 'writing' consists of 'badgering developers for specs and prototypes' or 'reorganizing the help.' (Work is better when it's busier because then I feel like I'm getting something done, but it's still not really the same.) When I'm writing... I like writing. Even the parts where I'm beating my head against it because it's Hard, because action sequences are complicated to describe or characters need more depth or I'm just plain not good enough to pull off what I'm trying to do, I still feel like I'm doing something worthwhile. It's just getting going on it all, instead of [insert other thing here], that's the hard part.
So, where to from here? I think my plan for the next week or two is to import the space story into Scrivener and integrate the feedback I got from the CVS critique back in July. After staring at Nano-quality prose for a month, I imagine I'll be overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of how well I can write when I give myself time to think about it, and that'll carry me through the revision process.
Which process will be its own breed of learning What To Do.
First: holy cow I did that. 50,000 words in any timeframe is impressive; doing it in a month is... nuts. (And doing 27,000 of those words in ten days is even more nuts.)
And I got lots of cheers and encouragement and 'yay you' from lots and lots of good people, plus an offer of cookies, and a headless fish from
uilos ("maybe someone took the head out to see a movie"), all of which were very heartening and yay.Scrivener is awesome and I strongly encourage all writers to take a look at it. (The Windows version is in beta right now and is expected to be available for real early next year.) I mostly created one document per scene and labeled them appropriately, which made finding the thing I had been talking about eight days ago ever so much easier than scrolling back through a single file. Plus I could write the ending and not have it dangling off the end of the current document. My only complaint is with the iffy export functionality. It'll save to RTF, but from the quick glance I gave it as I hit 'select-all, copy' to validate my wordcount, it's a pretty hideous RTF. Oh well.
I'm trying not to obsess about the quality of the writing, because I'm deliberately not going back and looking over it for at least another month. Probably longer. And it's not really fair to judge it based on what I thought of it while I was writing. Having said that, I don't think it was very good on the things I'm not instinctively good at (character and description / sense of place felt especially bad), and I'm pretty sure I badly flubbed the Big Emotional Climax. Mostly because I started writing it at about five PM on the 30th, when I'd already been writing for eight hours and I was more interested in making my wordcount than in making it work. On the other hand, the plot mostly holds together, I think.
What I have here is a first draft that was written in full knowledge that it was just a first draft. I don't think I've ever done that before, with anything. It's... freeing. I hope it'll be even more so when I go back and look at it and it turns out to be 'bad, but not as bad as i remember.' If I can write a thousand words a day of fixable-quality prose, I'm in good shape.
And... now I miss the feeling of sitting down to write. Writing for work isn't the same, not now when work 'writing' consists of 'badgering developers for specs and prototypes' or 'reorganizing the help.' (Work is better when it's busier because then I feel like I'm getting something done, but it's still not really the same.) When I'm writing... I like writing. Even the parts where I'm beating my head against it because it's Hard, because action sequences are complicated to describe or characters need more depth or I'm just plain not good enough to pull off what I'm trying to do, I still feel like I'm doing something worthwhile. It's just getting going on it all, instead of [insert other thing here], that's the hard part.
So, where to from here? I think my plan for the next week or two is to import the space story into Scrivener and integrate the feedback I got from the CVS critique back in July. After staring at Nano-quality prose for a month, I imagine I'll be overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of how well I can write when I give myself time to think about it, and that'll carry me through the revision process.
Which process will be its own breed of learning What To Do.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-06 01:04 am (UTC)I do find that my process has changed substantially (sometimes better, sometimes worse) over the time I've done Nano, and it's pretty fascinating to watch. Good luck with the continuation of your learning curve. :)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-06 04:06 pm (UTC)Which is to say, not nearly enough hours. :) I think it's changed my process so that it's made me less... afraid, I guess, to write, and makes it easier to get the words on paper. I hope.