GSG NaNo Gaiden
For the last three years, I’ve done a daily podcast during the month of November to encourage people to get their writing done. It was a lot of fun, but also took a lot of time. And over the last year, I’ve realized a couple of things.
1. You don’t need my advice.
Seriously. Write your story the way you want to. NaNo isn’t about getting the story right, it’s about getting the story on paper. Or on screen or whatever. You want advice regarding that? Here it is.
BICHOK. Butt In Chair. Hands On Keyboard. 2000 words a day, six days a week. Done. That’s how I’ve done the last five years, and have “won” NaNo five years in a row. I’ve never not hit 50k in November. Write or Die has figured heavily in my success, and using it, I can usually get 1000+ words in an hour. If you’ll sit down and just write, this isn’t that hard to do.
2. You really don’t need my advice.
Anything I say about a story is potentially going to get in the way of your writing. I have a way of writing that works for me. I like writing about people encountering obstacles and overcoming those obstacles. When I write, it’s primarily science fiction or fantasy if it’s fiction, and if it’s something else – like a blog post here, it’s normally a way of me venting a bit of my spleen out into the general internet. I’m not an expert on writing. I’m certainly not an expert on writing well. I beg, borrow and steal most all of the advice I’ve given. That which I have not grabbed from others, I have made up out of whole cloth. I’m a fiction writer. I do stuff like that.
3. Other people are happy to give you advice.
If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo this year, there are a lot of places for you to get good advice. Try the NaNo forums, for example. Or other blogs or podcasts. Plenty of places. Lots of advice. Which may or may not be good advice. I’m not going to make any guarantees of the quality of any advice you may find out there, especially not mine.
4. Focus.
This year, I just want to make the best story I can. I’ll be shooting for, and will almost certainly hit 50,000 words. (Which will be an extra super challenge now that I’ve just totally jinxed myself. Watch me get hit by a bus on Nov 2nd.) Quantity != quality. But that quantity is a necessary precursor to quality.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this year, 2013, there will be no GSG NaNo Gaiden Daily Podcast. Last year’s podcast is still out there, and you can listen to that if you need to, but the truth is you don’t need to.
And that’s pretty much it. Good luck to all of us who are participating this year, and may your plot twists be plentiful, artfully yet not obviously foreshadowed, and may your characters suffer appropriately.
