Monday, November 14, 2011

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

I'm embarrassed to even show my face.

Remember the last time I blogged my "daily" NaNoWriMo advice? What was that, over a week ago now?

As Clementine would say, "Or ten days. Okay, fine."

Yeah. That's the last time I wrote on my NaNo novel, too.

There was a train, see. And a city. And a sister I haven't seen in a year. And when it was all said and done, there were 11,000 very bad, very boring words of a novel I hoped never to be forced to read, let alone write.

The thing is, when I was writing every day, I could force myself to keep going. And if I had kept going, I probably would have ended up someplace okay. Then I could have revised okay into decent, and decent into all right, and all right into good, and good into great, and great into fabulous, and I would have had a finished novel.

But I stopped.

And when you stop while the novel is still awful, you won't start again.

So don't stop. Don't be like me. Don't do what I did and go from 11,000 words to ... 87.

As for me? The month isn't even half over and I'm not done yet.

See you tomorrow. I mean it!

2 comments:

Granny Kate said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Granny Kate said...

My word count sucked, but not as bad as the content. Wow, I didn't even know I could write that badly. I haven't done fiction for awhile. I forgot how I used to do that. I used to step right in to the middle of the story and the characters simply did what they do. This time I was outside trying to write them into doing something and they were yawning and glaring and sneering and all kinds of things you don't want characters to do -- unless there's some kind of story in there that needs yawning, glaring and sneering.

(I removed the previous post so I could spell at least a couple of the words right.)