Where My Worst Is Good Enough
Just like the past couple of years, I didn't do a bit of pre-planning for NANOWRIMO. This year I've been even worse than usual. I didn't even buy my writer's notebook. This has been the highlight of past years leading up to NANO. Technically, it's the time that I consider the month to start even though I almost always do this in October.
Though I have real life money problems to blame for this more than any neglect. I'm going to do this tomorrow because tomorrow is when I actually start.
Thusfar, I've written once. I wrote when I got home from the Hold Steady concert (even though I was there for the openers Art Brut. I could have gone to sleep, but I really wanted to get a start sooner than usual. I wrote for about 30 minutes when I got home at 12:15 a.m.
I wrote like a storm and got 1,037 under my belt before I went to sleep.
The key was that I'm actually using a narrator this year as opposed to that third person omniscent voice in the sky. As I mentioned before, the narrator is a plastic "envelope" for an environmentally conscious movie-to-your-home company (called Little Green Envelope).
What I discovered yesterday in starting my novel is that he's sort of bitter with his place in life. He's always referring to "you humans" to describe the differences between Little Green Envelopes and you and I (the collective you).
He has no name and I don't think he's going to. Though other "envelopes" are going to have to refer to this one at some point so he might have to.
The "you humans" that appear in the novel are going to have to have names. But I don't think they're going to appear until what I write tomorrow. And when I have to start thinking of names, I'll actually have to come up with things like personality for the characters.
The next bit of writing is going to be the little green envelope apologizing for not understanding the rules of narrative writing since he's only seen movies. I hope that this will allow satirization of movies at some point in the future. There's going to need to be something since I don't know what the plot is yet. Then again, I didn't know that in the similar novel in 2004 either.
---
It sounds like it, I'm sure but I'm already hanging around on the "NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul" boards.
There is an interesting thread called "Anti-Nanoers" in which a LiveJournal entry by a guy with a giant stick up his bum about NaNoWriMo is linked. He goes off for the entire entry about how no one who does NaNoWriMo is a real writer. He's more bitter than my narrator but a lot of what he says is true.
There are way too many people on the site with dreams way bigger than their talent. But I think most people get the fact that you can't write the Great American Novel in 30 days. I saw an icon on the NaNo LiveJournal community today that said, "your worst is good enough."
I think most people by the middle of their first year, unless they were already pretty good writers coming in, realize that NaNoWriMo is somewhere between a 30-day brainstorming session and just a way to have fun writing things that will never be published.
I know if I were worried about getting published, I would never in a million attempts write a novel where the narrator is a Little Green Envelope.
Though I have real life money problems to blame for this more than any neglect. I'm going to do this tomorrow because tomorrow is when I actually start.
Thusfar, I've written once. I wrote when I got home from the Hold Steady concert (even though I was there for the openers Art Brut. I could have gone to sleep, but I really wanted to get a start sooner than usual. I wrote for about 30 minutes when I got home at 12:15 a.m.
I wrote like a storm and got 1,037 under my belt before I went to sleep.
The key was that I'm actually using a narrator this year as opposed to that third person omniscent voice in the sky. As I mentioned before, the narrator is a plastic "envelope" for an environmentally conscious movie-to-your-home company (called Little Green Envelope).
What I discovered yesterday in starting my novel is that he's sort of bitter with his place in life. He's always referring to "you humans" to describe the differences between Little Green Envelopes and you and I (the collective you).
He has no name and I don't think he's going to. Though other "envelopes" are going to have to refer to this one at some point so he might have to.
The "you humans" that appear in the novel are going to have to have names. But I don't think they're going to appear until what I write tomorrow. And when I have to start thinking of names, I'll actually have to come up with things like personality for the characters.
The next bit of writing is going to be the little green envelope apologizing for not understanding the rules of narrative writing since he's only seen movies. I hope that this will allow satirization of movies at some point in the future. There's going to need to be something since I don't know what the plot is yet. Then again, I didn't know that in the similar novel in 2004 either.
---
It sounds like it, I'm sure but I'm already hanging around on the "NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul" boards.
There is an interesting thread called "Anti-Nanoers" in which a LiveJournal entry by a guy with a giant stick up his bum about NaNoWriMo is linked. He goes off for the entire entry about how no one who does NaNoWriMo is a real writer. He's more bitter than my narrator but a lot of what he says is true.
There are way too many people on the site with dreams way bigger than their talent. But I think most people get the fact that you can't write the Great American Novel in 30 days. I saw an icon on the NaNo LiveJournal community today that said, "your worst is good enough."
I think most people by the middle of their first year, unless they were already pretty good writers coming in, realize that NaNoWriMo is somewhere between a 30-day brainstorming session and just a way to have fun writing things that will never be published.
I know if I were worried about getting published, I would never in a million attempts write a novel where the narrator is a Little Green Envelope.
posted by incendiarymind at 5:47 PM
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