Anyone else doing national novel writing month, aka nanowrimo?

After wanting to do it for 11 years, I finally took the plunge this year.  For the uninitiated, nanowrimo is an annual challenge where you strive to write a 50K word novel entirely during the month of November.  You're allowed to do worldbuilding, planning, plotting, character backgrounds, all that crap earlier, but the actual book itself has to be completely written during the 30 days that is November.  I personally love challenges like this - I'm an artsy fartsy type but sometimes lack the motivation to tackle a project as big as writing a novel.

Well this year I'm doing it and it's going well!  I spent many months working on an extremely thorough outline, so that when November 1st rolled around the actual writing was easy.  As of right now I'm at 34360 words.  I should hit the 50K goal easily, however I think my book will need to be closer to 100K to be truly finished.  That's another challenge, right there.  

Anyone else giving it a try?

My sister-in-law (author of Hale Fire, get it now on Amazon!) is giving it a try. I've done a handful of books myself but being how-tos, they're paced differently when it comes to output. It's been really interesting talking to her about the process.

Good luck!

I used camp nanowrimo this summer to write my first ever writing project - a novella, about 15K words about a character that's reminiscent of Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2, but set a dystopian future that's basically Mad Max set in Baltimore.  I'm a firm believer in thorough planning so it was fun to just write off the cuff.  

Your sister in law's book is very highly rated on Amazon.  I'll have to give it a try!

This is the 11th time I've attempted it since 2009, and am 9 for 10 previously.

Sitting at 28,000 words as of last night.  I tend to usually squeak across 50k at the end.  I've made it a bit harder this year by trying an adaptation of a public-domain work.

One of these days I need to figure out how to make an hour of writing/editing a part of my daily routine.

Good job, so far, infinitenexus!  Keep it up!

Awesome guys! I've thought about trying this several times. I always have ideas for stories kicking around in my head, but I have a hard time with long form plot. I don't know how many things I've started writing only to fade out a chapter or two in due to other commitments and just realizing i didn't know where I was going. 
 

I follow several author's blogs online, and sci fi writer Chuck Wendig is usually involved with nanowrimo if you're interested. He has done a lot of writing advice on his blog over the years too. 

My wife did it last year, and is doing it again this year. She was a lot more prepared this year, so the words are flowing a lot faster. She crossed 46k words last night. I believe she's stretched her goal to 80k for the month as that would be closer to the complete book. 

She's been doing some blogging for a little while now and a bunch of learning and stuff with various groups. I'm very proud of her as she's really taken to writing and getting better. I think she'll have a a couple books published within a few years if things keep going well. (Blog is "Purely Hoping", very different genre from this site, but some of you may find it interesting.)

ultraclyde (Forum Supporter) said:

Awesome guys! I've thought about trying this several times. I always have ideas for stories kicking around in my head, but I have a hard time with long form plot. I don't know how many things I've started writing only to fade out a chapter or two in due to other commitments and just realizing i didn't know where I was going. 
 

I follow several author's blogs online, and sci fi writer Chuck Wendig is usually involved with nanowrimo if you're interested. He has done a lot of writing advice on his blog over the years too. 

Brandon Sanderson has some really good blogs/interviews involving book writing and plot crafting that you might want to check out.  In fact I used his method to essentially create the outline for my book:  Think of 4-5 major events in the book and write them down, then start breaking each one down into smaller tasks that must be completed in order to accomplish those goals.  Then break those down, and break those down, etc.  In some places my outline describes every paragraph that I need to write, so it's made things pretty easy.

AWSX1686 (Forum Supporter) said:

My wife did it last year, and is doing it again this year. She was a lot more prepared this year, so the words are flowing a lot faster. She crossed 46k words last night. I believe she's stretched her goal to 80k for the month as that would be closer to the complete book. 

She's been doing some blogging for a little while now and a bunch of learning and stuff with various groups. I'm very proud of her as she's really taken to writing and getting better. I think she'll have a a couple books published within a few years if things keep going well. (Blog is "Purely Hoping", very different genre from this site, but some of you may find it interesting.)

That's fantastic!  I managed to find a creative mood last night and got up to 39,520.  I have today off so once my wife works I'm going to see if I can get another 5-6K words done today.  Publishing a book is one hell of an accomplishment.  I would love to do something like that.

I've been working on a novel for the last 15 years and I'm only a little over 2,000 words.  I like to describe the pace of my work as "like water wearing away stone."

infinitenexus said:

ultraclyde (Forum Supporter) said:

Awesome guys! I've thought about trying this several times. I always have ideas for stories kicking around in my head, but I have a hard time with long form plot. I don't know how many things I've started writing only to fade out a chapter or two in due to other commitments and just realizing i didn't know where I was going. 
 

I follow several author's blogs online, and sci fi writer Chuck Wendig is usually involved with nanowrimo if you're interested. He has done a lot of writing advice on his blog over the years too. 

Brandon Sanderson has some really good blogs/interviews involving book writing and plot crafting that you might want to check out.  In fact I used his method to essentially create the outline for my book:  Think of 4-5 major events in the book and write them down, then start breaking each one down into smaller tasks that must be completed in order to accomplish those goals.  Then break those down, and break those down, etc.  In some places my outline describes every paragraph that I need to write, so it's made things pretty easy.

Interesting approach. I'll have to check out his stuff. Thanks!

In reply to 1988RedT2 :

Sit down and try to plan out the plot a little bit maybe?  Give it a loose structure and start slowing filling it in, piece by piece.

infinitenexus said:

In reply to 1988RedT2 :

Sit down and try to plan out the plot a little bit maybe?  Give it a loose structure and start slowing filling it in, piece by piece.

I suppose that's one way to do it.  My characters pretty much go where they choose to, and I'm never sure where they'll go until I sit down and start writing.

I would hate to confine them to a "script" and have their actions predefined and inflexible.  This way I can let them be spontaneous.

I tried it last year, got to about 25,000 words. The final work ended up at 33,000 words, not exactly either a novel or a short story, but did seem like it could be an entertaining read. I'm still trying to figure out if I could cut it down to a short story, get a whole novel out of it, or maybe rework it as a movie script.

Managed to finish my first draft about a week ago, 50,050 words.  So glad I finished it, at the end I was worried.  Then I realized I left MASSIVE plot points out and I'll need to write probably 2 extra chapters to fix it, but that's okay.  It also needs a lot more "fleshing out" in places so I'm guessing once I fix all these it'll wind up being around 70-80K words.  That's still shorter than the type of novel I would ultimately like to write (more like 200K-300K words) but this is my first ever book so I'm happy.

I hit a wall literally the day after I posted in here, kind of fed up with the concept I started on, and had gotten to ~30k words with.  This happened a couple years ago too, but I decided I wasn't going to get stopped again.  so I just started typing blathering for about 45minutes, and it turned into something eventually.  Made to 51,000 words of an incomplete story with a weird segue in the middle on Sunday night.

sleepywife got to 50k on Saturday, maybe?  So, I've gotta figure out how to convert our docs to epub or something and we're planning to do an "exchange/read" deal.  Should be an interesting test of our marriage. 

In reply to ultraclyde (Forum Supporter) :

I have no real intentions of ever writing a novel, but Brandon Sanderson is probably my favorite author. High fantasy, so if you're into that genre I'd highly recommend his stuff. 

It's now December. How'd everyone do? Anything to share with the rest of the class? 

I believe my wife finished the month out at about 68k words. Still a little bit left to go to complete the story, but I think she's hoping to finish it by the end of the weekend. 

non canoe thread revival.

November is write around the corner, anybody taking the task of writing a novel this year?

I've tried to do it in the past.  I usually lose steam and lose inspiration in the second week

birdmayne said:

non canoe thread revival.

November is write around the corner, anybody taking the task of writing a novel this year?

I definitely am, I have a project ready to go. I've started taking writing seriously lately and wrote a few short stories--one was just accepted for publication in HyphenPunk magazine--and recently published my irst book, a fantasy novella, on Kindle U. Pretty exciting. My nanowrimo project will be a sci-fi/cyberpunk novel.

infinitenexus said:

birdmayne said:

non canoe thread revival.

November is write around the corner, anybody taking the task of writing a novel this year?

I definitely am, I have a project ready to go. I've started taking writing seriously lately and wrote a few short stories--one was just accepted for publication in HyphenPunk magazine--and recently published my irst book, a fantasy novella, on Kindle U. Pretty exciting. My nanowrimo project will be a sci-fi/cyberpunk novel.

That's awesome! I'm about 27K words in to my own first novel and having a ton of fun exploring it. Hoping to be done by the end of the year, with work and kids and life...