tfw the guy without a mobile face keeps trying to make facial expressions honey. no. You don't have a mouth to frown with.
I've been regularly getting one of my characters' pronouns wrong, so I can relate. I'm not doing NaNo this year, I've kiiiinda thought about writing that one probably terrible self-indulgent YA-like thing whose plot has been floating in my head for years, or possibly something from that setting I've been working on but have no plot for, but then I realized my studies might be more important than all that.
...does it count as getting pronouns wrong when, because of biased narration and linguistic differences, I keep accidentally using the correct pronouns when I should be using a wrong set (S uses they/them; Group A's language defaults to he/him for unknown quantities, but when narrating from someone in Group A's POV I keep using they/them for S. Oops.)
So I kinda want to do nano, but i'm really anxious to do try because i've never gotten far before. i'm not exactly sure what i'm looking for here, perhaps encouragement or advice? Mostly to express my anxiety at trying something that seems so big.
Different things work as encouragement for different people-- my "just fuckin write and worry about quality later" switch does not exist in all people! (Heck, it stops existing for me around week 2...) But if you want to do the thing, I think you should do the thing :3 If it helps at all, the 50k word count isn't actually necessary-- you can set your own goal, or write a bunch of tiny unrelated stories that just happen to hit that goal, or take the month to just get a chunk of an older project done. The official site has Rebels for a reason! :P
First time nano-er here. The way I look at it is... I might not "win" (by the definition of writing 50,000 words by midnight on November 30th), and that's okay. If I give myself permission to write for quantity without obsessing over quality, I might actually finish a story. Then I can go back and pick over every word until I'm happy with it. But usually I'm so hung up on wanting every sentence to be perfect that I barely write at all. Also, if there's one thing I've learned from marathon training, it's that having a supportive community all doing a hard thing at the same time makes it much easier to do the thing. Having a dedicated group of people to scream with helps a lot.
NaNo advice that comes down to: write fanfiction. Write derivative stories. Write the coulda shoulda woulda where you see another way a story could have gone, and be not afraid to put twists on it.
For keeping going, it helps me to take it one day at a time and focus on that day's chunk of words only. If I miss a day or fall short on a day I don't think about it as "Now I have to write X words to catch up" -- I ignore those and keep trying to successfully hit each day's 1,667 word goal. Otherwise, all those missed days and days where I fall short feel like such a big obstacle I grind to a halt. If I catch up, I catch up, if I don't I don't - the important part is that I did my best every day.
@Mercury that sounds actually like wonderful advice (and not just for nano). I think I'll do it as more of a: see how many of the 30 days I can hit word count rather than panic over the 50k. And as for content, I'm definitely sticking to fic, though I might do a bunch of short things, at least to start off.
I am attempting this thing for the first time ever. Maybe it'll help with the zero motivation I've had recently when it comes to writing.
The POV for the moose-guy has gone all noir. I don't write noir. Why. OTOH the little newt-gened informer is possibly my favourite minor character to write dialogue for. He's just so jittery and all over the place, all mouth and no trousers. :) Not quite hitting word count but after years of not writing at all, just over 1k words a day is pretty ok.
I get the feeling this is an idiom of some sort (equivalent to "all talk and no game" maybe?) but in combination with the newtman it was also a hilarious mental image
Missed the first day but now progressing nicely. Housemate already ships the only two characters so far.
each day as a separate chase sounds like a good way to keep from being overwhelmed by the weight of it.
I want so much to do nano, but lately I don't have time for all my erm, actual obligations. Still, I always want to do it, but I just... have never written anything long? My brain always wants to make things as short as possible, and I know you don't make something longer by just... using more words... So, uh, any advice for how make longer story?
be a filthy cheater and ignore your backspace/delete keys, counting any and all typos as their own words so you end up with "questino quesion qurstion question" and then one word us magically four words Fight the instinct to trim things down? Follow that side character! Digress into a lengthy explanation of That One Really Cool Bit of your worldbuilding! Become Tolkien and write horrendously over-detailed descriptions of scenery and genealogy! You can always trim down later :P Eta: also, if you realize midway through a scene/chapter/whatever that you don't actually need it-- those words still count. Strikethrough or make em the same color as your page background of you really need to not see them, but you wrote the thing! It's part of your total!
probably just spill a bunch of sideplots and minor conflicts all over the place? or add some shipping, if you're into that
