The Blue Candle Society

As someone who is now a four-time NaNoWriMo winner, I thought I should pass along some tips and tricks for others who might like to emulate my success.  My primary piece of wisdom from this year is that an ugly win is still a win.  In the past, I have taken a certain amount of pride in my smooth, workmanlike approach to nano, and the wonderful graphs that come out of it:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sadly, due to a bit of a personal crisis right at the end of the month, 2013’s progress looked like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My personal problems are writ throughout that last bit of the graph, where it gets all wobbly.  But I won, and  am now the proud possessor of an amorphous word-blob of approximately 50,000 units, which with a bunch of rewrites and maybe another 40,000 words, may be a book someday.  So how did I do it?  A few tips:

1. Visualize success.  If you believe you’ll reach 50,000 words, you will!

2. Sentences like “Man, this scene went off the rails.  Fix it later, if possible.  I suck.” count toward the 50k

3. So do long, rambling half-assed outlines of where the plot is going that stretch on for several pages, in a pinch

~ by smwilliams on December 3, 2013.

Posted in General writing things