Category: storytelling

NaNoWriMo Day 4

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 2 Comments

The woman I’m having dinner with wanted to do a “swap”–her art work for my fiction, and so I dug up a chapter of my old novel to share with her. One chapter, 8119 words. Jeez. That was before I learned that my writing was better when I cut any “full draft” down 25-30%. And also before I had mastered the art of writing descriptive detail. I was still in over-doing it mode back then to compensate for my earlier under-doing it instincts.

Anyway!

New words: 1417
Total words: 6718
Goal: 50,000
Percentage: 13.4%

Quote-worth snippet: nothing worth noting. I was just trying to finish my intro descriptive blurbs, and kind of rushing through them at that.

nano notes

NaNoWriMo Day 2

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 6 Comments

New words: 2249
Total words: 3250
Goal: 50,000
Percentage: 6.5%

Quote-worth snippet:

Connor flies out, yelling and flailing, then –

SMACK!

Is brought to a halt by something HARD he hits head-first.

TIGHT SHOT – He slumps flat, face-down on a dirt-covered plank of wood. His body is still for a moment. Finally, he shifts slightly and groans.

CONNOR
(muffled)
Ow.

Amazing how a little sleep (not to mention totally changing your tactics) can effect your effectiveness!

I will write no sentence before its time!

nano notes

Another problem with auto-word counts

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 3 Comments

INT. MY APARTMENT – AFTERNOON

If…you…use…periods…as…ellipses…between…words…without…a…space…it…counts…those…words…
as…one…word.

You… have… to… break… them… up… with… spaces… to… get… a… proper… word… count.

But–double–dashes–without–spaces–are–O.K.

Unless – there – is – one – of – them – with – two – spaces – on – either – side, in – which – case, the – dash – is – itself – counted – as – a – word.

More NaNowhinging

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 15 Comments

T-minus ten days and counting until Nov. 1st (which reminds me–buy birthday card for Mom!) I don’t think I’ve ever spent this amount of time outlining something before I just gave up and started writing it in my life. Well, maybe back in my teen years when I had this urge to write and nothing to say. Back then, all I did was outline until I got bored with whatever my story idea was (because there was no passion behind it) and tucked the half-finished outline in a bottom drawer.

Actually, like scrollgirl, I am writing a little bit of text of my NaNo “novel.” OK, probably a lot of text, but I’m not counting words, and it’s mostly scribblings of dialogue. Dialogue is always what I write in the “first pass” through the text of my new episodes. It serves as a kind of “skeleton” of a scripted scene and therefore is “practically part of the outline anyway.”

What I’ve figured out so far as a result of this outlining:

NaNo notes

Ways in which word counts are a pain in the ass

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 13 Comments

I just thought I’d get all my NaNo bitching done *before* NaNo starts, heh.

Question 1: How do you do a word count if the text of your story is scattered around in a million little files on your hard drive, *and* intermixed with your outline in any particular file, which doesn’t itself contribute to the actual word count? I mean, I guess you could just count the outline as well, but if you then erase or move the outline, your word count goes down because it was artificially inflated in the first place.

Question 2: How do you do a word count if you’re like me, and you have five versions of the same sentence all in a row because you haven’t decided which version you like best yet?

Do I really have such a different writing process than the rest of the human race, or is any of this making sense?

Ways in which I’m breaking the NaNo rules

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 8 Comments

(1) Fan fic instead of original fic. I wish it were otherwise, but I honestly got nothin’ at the moment. No plot? Big problem!

(2) I’m only working on three (possibly four) chapters of my “novel” instead of trying to belt out an entire rough draft.

(3) The “novel” in question? Already started. Two years ago.

(4) It’s in screenplay format.

(5) I already have bits and pieces of the new material written. In the official NaNo rules, it says you have to start on Nov 1. You can prepare before hand by, for example, making up an outline, but the actual text can’t be written until Nov 1. Um…hello? I don’t know how anyone else works, but my brain writes when it writes. Any time I am working on an outline, snippets of text enter my brain unbidden. Of course I’m going to write them down!

(6) I may or may not strive for 50,000 words. Do you *know* how many episodes of TD that is? 3.35293952. Approximately. I’m going to write three episode first drafts, and since I overwrite everything, those should come in together well over 50,000.

Can you tell I’d like to do NaNo by the rules and just can’t?

Dis/inhibition

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 25 Comments

Oh my God, I’m gonna cry. I’ve posted in here a bit about a novel I was writing for ages and ages up until about two years ago, one that I set aside because I basically outgrew it. It had gone through five drafts. The fourth draft took two years and was done with a writing coach. When we were through, she sent her hard copies of it to me, complete with her notes. I then did a fifth draft on my own for about a year before the setting-aside occured.

I backed the whole thing up on a zip disk and removed it from my hard drive. Last December, I went back to look something up in the manuscript only to discover the zip disk was corrupted, and I had lost not only the fifth draft but the fourth. Just gone.

I was devastated. All I had was the fourth draft in a hard copy.

Well, short story long, I just found a backup of the fifth draft that I had buried on my hard drive at work!

This doesn’t mean I’m going to start working on it again, but to have not lost it, to still have it, that means everything to me. It’s my baby. I was its mother, I was its lover, for ten years. It taught me how to write.