Monday, October 31, 2011

NaNoWriMo & Fiction word count

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow.  I don't know if I can hit 50,000 words in one month.  Some days I think I can and other days I can't.  My outline has over 10,000 words.  It may be too detailed.  We'll see if it helps or not.  I've never been much of an outline kind of person, but in this case I feel more comfortable having it.  It's like a security blanket.

In one of the books I read or podcasts I listened to, they talked about NPs and OPs.  By the way you answered the questions,  you were either an NP which is a No-Outline Person or an OP, an Outline Person.  I was in the category of NP.  Ray Bradbury was an NP.

I started a book with no outline, but will have to finish it when NNWM is over and when I'm done with the book I'm working on.  It's probably more liberating without an outline, but scary at the same time.

We all should keep in mind that if we don't hit the 50,000 word mark for our novel there are shorter forms of fiction they can be categorized in that may be better suited for our styles.  The following is a list of word count that I have found for various types of fiction:

Novella = 17,500 - 40,000 words
Novelette = 7,500 - 17,500
Short Story = under 7,500
Flash Fiction = under 1,000

I'm going to shoot for 2,000 words a day instead of 1,667 because I have to account for days I won't be able to write like Thanksgiving.


Friday, October 28, 2011

NaNoWriMo 2011 starts in 4 days.

I found out National Novel Writing Month about a month or two ago and have decided to participate.  This will be my first NaNoWriMo.

I wrote a pretty detailed outline for it and worked on it for a whole month.  Lots of elements in the story have changed since I started writing the outline and now I don't have an ending.  At this point, I'm just going to let the story write itself because even if I have an ending, it's most likely going to change as I write it.

I even went as far as creating bullet points for each chapter which may or may not help.

I have read quite a few books on writing and they all basically say the same thing, but the ones that I liked are: Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell and First Draft in 30 Days by Karen Wiesner.  Karen Wiesner described me to a T in her book.  It was like she was a psychic.

I am currently reading On Writing by Stephen King.  I don't usually read his books, but this is a good one!  He's a really good story-teller!

I'm going to eat a late dinner now and do some writing.  I already worked out today, so I'm justifying my late dinner, but still, it's probably not a good thing.