Pia Veleno's Blog: piaveleno.com - Posts Tagged "writing-secrets"
The Storyteller and NaNoWriMo
I’ve been working on my NaNo project every day. To be honest, I’d be writing this much even if it wasn’t November. Because of that, this will be the last year I officially participate in NaNoWriMo. Let’s face it, I don’t tend to remember to update that website after the first two weeks anyway, so I never technically “win”.
Is that so true? My first book was published last October and I have a second under contract. That’s a bigger win in my book. Fallen was written at a quicker pace that even NaNo requires, and the other, Man Whore, was last year’s NaNo. I hated it (Man Whore) by the third week of November, and eventually moved on to something else. A few month’s afterwards, I picked it up again and figured out why I got the big Suck Vibes off of it. At the time of its acceptance (not long before this year’s NaNo started) I had gone from hating it to not only loving it, but planning out several other books to follow in the series.
Is NaNo everything it’s cracked up to be? Sure it is, if you know how to use it. Can NaNo be bad for some writers? Absolutely, everyone has different writing styles and techniques. I’m not going to take sides, but I will admit that NaNo has been very helpful for me and, at the same time, I have designed other processes for completing my stories that work better for me.
How so? Well, I won’t bore you with the details, but sometimes a story isn’t ready to be told, and sometimes it flows at a daily pace of 2,000 words or more. For now, I’m on track for a NaNo word count and that isn’t counting blog posts, or the weekly CRANK freebie that will still be completed throughout the NaNo competition. This is my job. I love it, but it’s still a job, and writing words daily is the main skill required to continue the work I love. It’s time I admit that I don’t need things like Resolutions and NaNoWriMo to be a storyteller.
Is that so true? My first book was published last October and I have a second under contract. That’s a bigger win in my book. Fallen was written at a quicker pace that even NaNo requires, and the other, Man Whore, was last year’s NaNo. I hated it (Man Whore) by the third week of November, and eventually moved on to something else. A few month’s afterwards, I picked it up again and figured out why I got the big Suck Vibes off of it. At the time of its acceptance (not long before this year’s NaNo started) I had gone from hating it to not only loving it, but planning out several other books to follow in the series.
Is NaNo everything it’s cracked up to be? Sure it is, if you know how to use it. Can NaNo be bad for some writers? Absolutely, everyone has different writing styles and techniques. I’m not going to take sides, but I will admit that NaNo has been very helpful for me and, at the same time, I have designed other processes for completing my stories that work better for me.
How so? Well, I won’t bore you with the details, but sometimes a story isn’t ready to be told, and sometimes it flows at a daily pace of 2,000 words or more. For now, I’m on track for a NaNo word count and that isn’t counting blog posts, or the weekly CRANK freebie that will still be completed throughout the NaNo competition. This is my job. I love it, but it’s still a job, and writing words daily is the main skill required to continue the work I love. It’s time I admit that I don’t need things like Resolutions and NaNoWriMo to be a storyteller.
