Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

nanowrimo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 73 posts

Re: NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

#41

Post by Jemaclus »

tunesmith wrote: post #38

I'm in a small writing club and all four of us are trying it. I successfully finished it two years ago with a series of ten interlocking short stories that (surprise!) tell a complete story as a novel by the end. One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality. They talk about vomit-drafts, and/or just sitting down to write to see where it takes them, to see…

Well, the explicit goal of NaNoWriMo is word count, not quality. You aren't wrong in your analysis, but NaNoWriMo is not the event through which you write complex stories and spend a ton of time thinking about each scene. It's pretty explicitly for plowing through as many words as possible in 30 days.

An analogy I would make is that a marathon is measured as 26.2 miles. It's not measured in minutes or hours -- it's not the 2:30 run, for example. The standard of success is measured in miles, not minutes. Similarly, NaNoWriMo is measured in words, not quality or twists or ready-to-be-published state.

You are right, though. It's good motivation. I've finished every year for 10 years, but I've never gotten anything to a state I would consider to be even remotely publishable. :)

Re: NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

#42

Post by Jemaclus »

phoe-krk wrote: post #6

I've finally managed to complete it in 2021 and 2022. This year is much harder because writing prose causes a lot of hard topics to get brought up from my subconscious into my everyday, but I'm still aiming for 50k this year and not giving up.

I believe in you!

Re: NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

#43

Post by criley2 »

tunesmith wrote: post #38

I'm in a small writing club and all four of us are trying it. I successfully finished it two years ago with a series of ten interlocking short stories that (surprise!) tell a complete story as a novel by the end. One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality. They talk about vomit-drafts, and/or just sitting down to write to see where it takes them, to see…

For the record, the point of NaNoWriMo is pure word count, and folks consider December to be "National Novel Editing Month" where you refine the word vomit.

Obviously this is not the only approach to writing, and some folks are incompatible with the concept of "just write with abandon" and "sort it all out and refine it in edit".

If you want to write and edit at the same time, consider halving your total word count (since they take two months to do that), or double your time (and continue through December).

Re: NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

#44

Post by 5555624 »

tunesmith wrote: post #38

I'm in a small writing club and all four of us are trying it. I successfully finished it two years ago with a series of ten interlocking short stories that (surprise!) tell a complete story as a novel by the end. One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality. They talk about vomit-drafts, and/or just sitting down to write to see where it takes them, to see…

>One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality.

That's the point or at least it was in the early days. NaNoWriMo came out of Chris Baty's book, "No Plot? No Problem!" and the point was to crank out 50,000 words in 30 days. The point was to sit down and write. As I recall, the book mentions "One Day Novelists' as in "One day I'm going to write a novel...." It's just a kick in the pants to get you to sit down and write. Don't edit, don't re-write, just write.

I've done (and completed) NaNoWriMo a dozen times (2004-2013, 2015, 2020) and I've never had an outline and only a basic idea of a plot when I started,, mainly because I didn't want to start writing before 1 November. One way to handle twists and foreshadowing is not to write it in order (I used to bike to and from work and those 40 minutes each day was when I'd work to what happened next or what happened to get to where I was in the story.)

The first year, I took the "scientific approach" and started out just writing 1,667 words a day. While that was always my daily goal, I did abandon it. The most words I wrote in a single day was 10,596 (20-Nov-2007).

Re: NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

#45

Post by jdriselvato »

I love NaNoWriMo and have written and won every year since 2019. My only issue is once the month is complete, no one cares about your novel or that you finished it.

So when I got laid off earlier in the year I started working on an alternative to NaNo.

https://penpinery.com

At the moment it's in MVP but it current has:

- Author profiles w/ blogging - Publication cataloging + reader reviews - WIP cataloging with word count tracking - A community feed similar to Goodreads + WIP word count updates

The idea is I think NaNo could be more social post-November. With Pen Pinery's current MVP I think Authors can build a readership fanbase much easier than anything NaNo could do.

In the future I want to also have goal tracking based on pages instead of word count and for editing as well. I also think there's a lot of potential for building out an ARC sign up system.

Pretty much I've self-published 15+ books and I'm putting everything that worked for me into a social author/reading platform.

Authors who use NaNo or are completely against it, I'd love to get some feedback on the concept from a description standpoint. Any thoughts or tips?

---

Since this is YC, the tech stack is Django 4, Postgres and Bootstrap 5; Hosted on DigitalOcean.

Re: NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

#46

Post by boznz »

tunesmith wrote: post #38

I'm in a small writing club and all four of us are trying it. I successfully finished it two years ago with a series of ten interlocking short stories that (surprise!) tell a complete story as a novel by the end. One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality. They talk about vomit-drafts, and/or just sitting down to write to see where it takes them, to see…

Congratulate yourself it is a great internal achievement to finish writing something. I just published my first book this month, I'm not sure how the mojo came, it certainly wasn't a special month though I did manage 10K words during last NaNoWriMo.

The floodgates opening for me was being stuck in a hotel room during a cyclone for 3 days without power and an old Chromebook which I nursed to fourteen hours of battery by turning the brightness all the way down and closing the lid to put it in sleep mode during the times I was thinking. That got me the re-start I needed.

Re: NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

#48

Post by probably_wrong »

starkparker wrote: post #31
aoanla wrote: post #7

I'm glad that NaNoWriMo continues to work for people, but I think it's important to note that it doesn't work for everyone - and it's ok if it doesn't work for you. I attempted it twice in consecutive years about a decade and a half ago, and not only failed to complete anything, but was also driven into a worse depression because of it. I had to avoid people talking about it in November for years afterwards or I'd st…

It being November is especially hard on US people with any kids or large active families, dealing with big Thanksgiving plans. No matter how well you plan, you really only get two meaningful weeks before the wall hits you. "Just set a reasonable word count to hit every day!" Then each day you miss days because your side dish plans went sideways or your flights get rescheduled, making the goal steeper every other day.…

December is not any better. There's nothing like hating your family and their dumb "let's be together and make happy, everlasting memories" ideas when all you want is to debug your A* algorithm for the Advent of Code.

Re: NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

#49

Post by boznz »

vidarh wrote: post #27
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone read then? My experience in writing things online is that barely anyone reads them and even fewer comment on them. I might just suck at it, but if didn't someone would probably pay me to do it.

The average published novel hardly sells (couple of hundred copies on average), so if you write for the sake of a big audience, novels are not the thing to write - in that case aim for articles in a well read paper or magazine. Selling even reasonably well takes a mix of persistency (building an audience over multiple works), talent, hard work promoting it yourself, and luck.

So true. I'm still learning the hard part about writing is not the writing, it is getting someone to read it. I documented it here => https://rodyne.com/?page_id=1252

Re: NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

#50

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

bowsamic wrote: post #23
cfr2023 wrote: post #18

NaNoWriMo, though a net positive force in the world, strikes me as a creative exercise for non-creatives. Truly not a bad thing, no offense intended. Trying to create regularly will help you become more creative. However, if you're already someone that is able to maintain a writing schedule and hit daily targets of hundreds of words, and can see your dream works emerge through the simple act of scheduling... I'm gent…

The problem is that most people just fundamentally don't want to make art. NaNoWriMo is in many ways just an excuse to force themselves to do so "because they know they should".

> most people just fundamentally don't want to make art

And they're right, because 99.9% of them would be bad at it. Probably it would not even have any therapeutical value for them, and the 0.1% of new artists discovered might not be a significant upside.

The name is terrible too, sounds like Orwell's Minitruth and similar 1940s abbreviations - "Hey, comrades, there is a dire shortage of blather, and the Great National Novel is nowhere in sight. Therefore our enlightened leadership has established a program with the catchy name NaNoWriMo, and all youth is enrolled."

Post reply on HN