{"id":1366,"date":"2011-11-01T22:11:27","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T05:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=1366"},"modified":"2017-04-08T20:56:58","modified_gmt":"2017-04-09T03:56:58","slug":"nano-rules-that-lead-to-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/01\/nano-rules-that-lead-to-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"Nano Rules That Lead to Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?attachment_id=1367\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1367\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/IMG_20111101_195417.jpg\" alt=\"Mocha Freeze at Cafe Borrone, With Laptop Reflection\" title=\"IMG_20111101_195417\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1367\" srcset=\"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/IMG_20111101_195417.jpg 640w, https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/IMG_20111101_195417-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/IMG_20111101_195417-600x450.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is my sixth year attempting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nanowrimo.org\">Nanowrimo<\/a> and my sixth (and seventh) Nano book, and I&#8217;ve learned to adopt a few rules to help make the thing progress.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Nanowrimo comes first.<\/strong> All existing writing projects should be scheduled for before or after Nano. One of the worst experiences I had was trying to finish <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/2009\/11\/38000-words-in-10-days.html\">38000 words of Nano in 10 days<\/a> after having lost almost half of it to editing FROST MOON.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Internet stays off until 1,667 words are done.<\/strong> There are a dozen reasons to use the Internet &#8211; to look something up, to check your email, to blog on Facebook. DON&#8217;T. Not even if you&#8217;re ahead. Get a whole day&#8217;s writing in before you log on. In particular, NO BLOGGING, Tweeting or Facebooking until you&#8217;re caught up. Turn your Internet off if you have to &#8211; that&#8217;s what I do, writing on a laptop.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Don&#8217;t read+eat, then write; write+eat, then read.<\/strong> This one may not apply to you. I have a day job at The Search Engine That Starts With A G, so to get writing done, 3-5 days a week as wife, cats and friends permit, I go to dinner by myself, read something to feed my head, and then go out for coffee and write. But sometimes writing gets the short shrift when you do that, if you&#8217;re reading something interesting or get lost in email. Normally that&#8217;s OK; you should read more that you put out in writing. In Nano, I have to upend this and write first, come hell or high water.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Look things up later &#8211; use &lt;angle brackets&gt; if you have to.<\/strong> Even if you don&#8217;t have the Internet, there are ways to look things up when you&#8217;re writing. Don&#8217;t. If you don&#8217;t know Marcus Tullius Cicero&#8217;s name, just write &lt;cicero&#8217;s name&gt; in angle brackets and go back later, searching for angle brackets and looking things up. Your writing will thank you.<\/li>\n<li><strong>If you know the plot, write all the beats down, then expand them later.<\/strong> My process involves thinking about stories long before I write them. I think of a dozen, a hundred, a thousand ideas for every one I write down. I&#8217;ve been thinking about HEX CODE, for example, for a few years, and my head&#8217;s full of ideas. So sometimes, even when your writing juice is gone, you can quickly bang down the beats of the plot &#8211; &#8220;Cinnamon leaves for the Rogue. She gets paranoid by the park. She thinks she sees somebody. Then Tully surprises her and gives her grief.&#8221; There&#8217;s 500 words tomorrow, all planned out today.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Use the Nano community.<\/strong> There&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nanowrimo.org\/en\/forums\/usa-california-south-bay\/threads\/5402\">South Bay Nanowrimo community<\/a> and while I haven&#8217;t had time to go to their events this year I did have time to learn from their wisdom. In particular, they had a suggestion to get a head start by going to a Denny&#8217;s on Halloween and starting writing at midnight to get an entire day&#8217;s writing in before the first day had really started. I was too wiped to do that, but &#8230;<\/li>\n<li><strong>Get a head start.<\/strong> &#8230; but I was not too wiped to set my alarm for thirty minutes past midnight and to get up and write at home. I stayed up from about 12:45 to 3AM, alternating between writing and puttering with the cats. I got a lot written &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=1357\">1129 words<\/a>. Then I took my laptop to lunch and finished out my day. Then I took my laptop to dinner and started work on the next day. Then I took my laptop to Cafe Borrone&#8217;s and finished out the SECOND day. The result? I wrote 3500 words today. If I can keep up 1667 words a day, then I&#8217;ll finish a day early. Woot!<\/li>\n<li><strong>Track your progress.<\/strong> I use a spreadsheet which I&#8217;m going to detail in a later post, but the long and the short of it is that you need to do 1667 words a day to finish 50,000 words by the end of November. Track your progress and hold your feet to the fire.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Write, write, WRITE!<\/strong> Enough said? No. There&#8217;s a lot of planning you may need to do to finish Nano. WRITE FIRST. Get yourself a day or two ahead. THEN PLAN. Some of your best work will come from winging it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Finally, one more word of wisdom. Don&#8217;t start work on your second Nano book until you&#8217;ve finished your daily quota for the first. It&#8217;s better to finish one book than it is to have two half finished books in the month. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blitzcomics.com\/\">Remember, it&#8217;s better to be done!<\/a> In fact, I&#8217;ll go further and say you should take a little break between the two of them, to say, for example, blog your Nano writing rules, just so you&#8217;ll tackle the second book fresh. This advice only applies to insane people trying to do 2 novels in Nano. <\/p>\n<p>So, the result of me following these rules? 3500 words done today on HEX CODE:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?attachment_id=1370\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1370\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/Nano-2011-11-01-Hex-Code-600x417.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"Nano 2011-11-01 Hex Code\" width=\"600\" height=\"417\" class=\"alignright size-large wp-image-1370\" srcset=\"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/Nano-2011-11-01-Hex-Code-600x417.png 600w, https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/Nano-2011-11-01-Hex-Code-300x208.png 300w, https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/Nano-2011-11-01-Hex-Code.png 1401w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And seriously, I&#8217;m only 96 extra words into STRANDED. Instead of trying to complete two Nano books, I&#8217;m going to try to make progress on completing my beta reader draft of STRANDED during my Nano downtime, as long as I&#8217;m making ahead-of-schedule progress on HEX CODE. <\/p>\n<p>And if I finish that &#8230; THEN I can think of tackling STRANDED as a second Nano.<\/p>\n<p>-the Centaur<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is my sixth year attempting Nanowrimo and my sixth (and seventh) Nano book, and I&#8217;ve learned to adopt a few rules to help make the thing progress. Nanowrimo comes&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,1,202],"tags":[86,6,4,91,87],"class_list":["post-1366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-challenges","category-uncategorized","category-writing","tag-blitz-comics","tag-dakota-frost","tag-dragon-writers","tag-nanowrimo","tag-the-dresanians","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1366"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1414,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions\/1414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}