other uses for nano technology
Oct. 21st, 2009 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alenxa_classicI am looking for AlterNaNo this year, because what I want to do is motivate myself to continue a novel I have been working on. I don't care if I get a prize or a shirt or anything; I got that last year and all it does is remind me that I didn't finish the work, only the project goal. What I want is to find an independent wordcount log server, which is not only independent of NaNo itself but also of month, friend group, and other people's goals. I want to be able to enter the starting wordcount and track progress rather than be tied to a zero start. But this is explicitly against NaNo rules, as I originally found out in 2006 and reconfirmed today. And speaking as someone who's won the thing, their official, FAQ-listed reasoning for requiring an entry be started from absolute scratch is bullshit.
The FAQ says that starting with any idea of what you are doing is often a bad choice, because regardless of what your teachers have been feeding you since your first "writing process" assignment, preparation is not key when you are writing solely for wordcount. If you have an outline, you may feel hindered by it; if you have none, you will be liberated to write about anything and everything. I dunno…I had an outline, some characters, some ancient history, and some world details, and I still managed to write 50,016 official words, without sparing the crap and without excessive sackcloth and ashes. Yes, it is harder to write with utter abandon if you are very familiar with your characters and/or plot, but it is far from impossible. It is not necessary to start November with neither. And unless you are writing the equivalent of "Fleeby fleeby POING! and pink ferrets scrabbled happily down the stairs" for 30 days, you are going to find a plot and define a character or two by the end of it, and you are going to care about them because that's what a novel is: a story of a certain length involving characters moving through a plot. If you don't have both elements, and you're not a disciple of James Joyce, chances are you're not writing a novel.
The rest of the reason, that caring about your plot and/or character(s) tends to be paralyzing, is a double-edged sword. If you care, you will take a little more time to write. If you do not care, and you actively cultivate not caring, you had damn well better not have a 50,001st word to add on December 1, because if you're not doing this for a paying contract then you're not likely to care enough to ever go back and do more. And if you do slip up and care a little despite your best efforts, you had better love the drivel that's pouring from your keyboard, or at least be absolutely at peace with it being drivel, or you're likely to be too ashamed of it to go back and improve.
There is a reason that starting strictly from scratch makes good sense, but it's not posted on the site. That reason is the difficulty a writer might have in separating what was in the file on October 31 from what was added afterward. People who write strictly in chronological order would be fine with this, but I don't know how prevalent that method is when one is writing for oneself and not for a word counter. I jump around in my stories all the time, throwing out a paragraph or a bit of a scene here and there as the mood and the wording strikes me. Picking out new vs. old writing is always a struggle, especially when my bad habit of keeping more than one working copy of a master file catches up with me and I need to make yet another copy to run side-by-side legal comparison. One can write in a different color or font, or write scenes in separate small files and string them together later, but when racing toward a deadline that might be unlike anything one has ever before experienced, these can be too easy to booch. And it's not in the spirit of NaNo to have different rules for first-time participants. Nor is it a good idea for a writer to try to learn an unfamiliar procedural quirk when speed of production is the only real goal.
So I can't do what I want to do with NaNo, because NaNo has it codified that trying to win the way I won last year is literary suicide. What it doesn't recognize is that I used it as a learning tool. I am normally a slower writer than George R. R. Martin, and I taught myself that I can, in fact, forge ahead and not give a damn about quality when quality is not at issue. Wordcount is the goal, so I produced wordcount. And you know what it felt like? Writing the first draft of an essay the night before it's due, when you've spent the past week reviewing the material and synthesizing your thoughts, and the words just sort of make sentences on the page all by themselves. I'm used to this. I'm good at this. I spent many years of my life doing essentially this. I don't need to start from scratch; I just need a due date or some other kind of external goal. I need someone to give a damn that I've done what I set out to do, and to actually judge me in a way that matters to me if I don't make it. But I can't find a framework for anything like this, except for NaNo. And that makes me more frustrated than being unable to think of an idea to use in doing NaNo for real.
The FAQ says that starting with any idea of what you are doing is often a bad choice, because regardless of what your teachers have been feeding you since your first "writing process" assignment, preparation is not key when you are writing solely for wordcount. If you have an outline, you may feel hindered by it; if you have none, you will be liberated to write about anything and everything. I dunno…I had an outline, some characters, some ancient history, and some world details, and I still managed to write 50,016 official words, without sparing the crap and without excessive sackcloth and ashes. Yes, it is harder to write with utter abandon if you are very familiar with your characters and/or plot, but it is far from impossible. It is not necessary to start November with neither. And unless you are writing the equivalent of "Fleeby fleeby POING! and pink ferrets scrabbled happily down the stairs" for 30 days, you are going to find a plot and define a character or two by the end of it, and you are going to care about them because that's what a novel is: a story of a certain length involving characters moving through a plot. If you don't have both elements, and you're not a disciple of James Joyce, chances are you're not writing a novel.
The rest of the reason, that caring about your plot and/or character(s) tends to be paralyzing, is a double-edged sword. If you care, you will take a little more time to write. If you do not care, and you actively cultivate not caring, you had damn well better not have a 50,001st word to add on December 1, because if you're not doing this for a paying contract then you're not likely to care enough to ever go back and do more. And if you do slip up and care a little despite your best efforts, you had better love the drivel that's pouring from your keyboard, or at least be absolutely at peace with it being drivel, or you're likely to be too ashamed of it to go back and improve.
There is a reason that starting strictly from scratch makes good sense, but it's not posted on the site. That reason is the difficulty a writer might have in separating what was in the file on October 31 from what was added afterward. People who write strictly in chronological order would be fine with this, but I don't know how prevalent that method is when one is writing for oneself and not for a word counter. I jump around in my stories all the time, throwing out a paragraph or a bit of a scene here and there as the mood and the wording strikes me. Picking out new vs. old writing is always a struggle, especially when my bad habit of keeping more than one working copy of a master file catches up with me and I need to make yet another copy to run side-by-side legal comparison. One can write in a different color or font, or write scenes in separate small files and string them together later, but when racing toward a deadline that might be unlike anything one has ever before experienced, these can be too easy to booch. And it's not in the spirit of NaNo to have different rules for first-time participants. Nor is it a good idea for a writer to try to learn an unfamiliar procedural quirk when speed of production is the only real goal.
So I can't do what I want to do with NaNo, because NaNo has it codified that trying to win the way I won last year is literary suicide. What it doesn't recognize is that I used it as a learning tool. I am normally a slower writer than George R. R. Martin, and I taught myself that I can, in fact, forge ahead and not give a damn about quality when quality is not at issue. Wordcount is the goal, so I produced wordcount. And you know what it felt like? Writing the first draft of an essay the night before it's due, when you've spent the past week reviewing the material and synthesizing your thoughts, and the words just sort of make sentences on the page all by themselves. I'm used to this. I'm good at this. I spent many years of my life doing essentially this. I don't need to start from scratch; I just need a due date or some other kind of external goal. I need someone to give a damn that I've done what I set out to do, and to actually judge me in a way that matters to me if I don't make it. But I can't find a framework for anything like this, except for NaNo. And that makes me more frustrated than being unable to think of an idea to use in doing NaNo for real.
