Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Thursday, November 15, 2012

NaNoWriMo : Demon World part 5 & Tips 5

Yesterday I managed to write more than 3700 words.Which means that I also covered the number of words needed for today.
All Novels Drafts 

Normally in my previous novels as I already mentioned earlier I would treat the story somewhat linearly, going from the start to the end with one single character. Actually right now, I find it rather refreshing to be able to jump to another place when I'm getting tired of writing what's happening somewhere. Of course I'm still writing the story from the start to the end but his style seems to be allowing me more flexibility.
As today we are reaching the mid point of this novel writing month, and I know that a lot of you are getting tired of writing and failing with their word counts and putting extreme efforts to catch up, lets me introduce a tool that allow you to write even when you have no idea for a certain length of time.
This tool is called "write or die". I'm linking to the free online version, I also need to save money !
"write or die" allows you to type type type, without break, it's good when you don't know what to write and need words because it forces you to type something and for NaNo, anything is ok, we'll see about editing in March!
So the tip of the day is : Abuse WRITE OR DIE !

Enlarge this document in a new window


 

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

NaNoWriMo : Demon World part 4 & Tips 4

First of all, sorry for the delay, with my crazy internet connection (or more accurately lack of connection) getting to publish something on yudu and having time to post it on a blog is not as easy as it should be. Anyway better later then never (as long as we don't miss the NaNo dead line) here is the next part of "Demon World".
I'm just on track for a normal NaNo but I didn't give up the idea of having few days advance really soon (like tonight).
If you are familiar with my writing ( "Demon Soul", "Demon and Fairy", "Attic Mirror", "Harajuku kiss") you will notice that this one is a bit different as a lot of things are happening simultaneously in three different places. The main reason why I am a bit late with my writing (other than the move) is that I developed some new characters.
All Novels Drafts 

Generally I use the same good old characters (Brownie, Sahel, Seti... ) actually I have a bunch of them, and most things happening at the same place, there is no problem with that. As this time part of the story happens on the bad guys side, I needed to create a lot of different new characters and that took a bit of time. For character creation I generally use few tricks to make sure they are three dimensional.
1) I give them a background (the back ground tells who they are what had happened to them in the past, this can be used as flashback, so it's very useful)
2) I give them emotions (as an example you can see that Davon is mostly driven by fear, fear of quitting, fear of being killed it things change, so he is kinda stuck and don't want to interact much with people) the emotion predict the characters' reaction.
3) I create a like between the characters (See the relationship between Sahel and Brownie)
 Basically you  can either write little paragraphs about each character's background or list characteristics with explanation sentence, just remember that the more details you know about your characters, the easier they will be to handle in the story.
So the tip of  the day is : Flashbacks add three dimensions to your characters and words to your word count.

Enlarge this document in a new window




Tuesday, November 6, 2012

NaNoWriMo : Tips 3

Yesterday I was moving to Sendai which is a city 6 hours by bus away North of Tokyo.
Therefore  when I finally had some free time for myself, all I wanted to do was sleeping and I didn't have time to write at all. My word count only raised but 9 words as I edited a part from the beginning.
I use a tool called "Karen's Countdown Timer II" which allows me to decide in advance at what time programs will start on my computer. Therefore last night I managed to write nine words because of it.
It's a very useful tool because you don't have to think about your daily task as it tells you when to do them.

The tip of the day will then be : 10 words are better than 1
By that I mean, don't look for the right word, in a draft, there is not such a thing as the right word. You'll have plenty of time to get the right word while editing and you'll need a lot of editing iteration to get them all right. So write as much as possible. Don't go look for the perfect adjective, describe the thing with bad one instead. What you want is enough words to be a NaNoWriMo winner. So you're character never "puts his jacket on", he "puts on the only jacket he had been wearing for year, it was torn apart at the bottom, the collar was shred on the back side and one of the sleeve color had past away with time, but at least he knew that tonight again he would be warm."
See what I mean, instead of 4 words, I got 49. Isn't it brilliant? Be creative and write, write, write !!!




Update on "Demon World" will probably be added tomorrow, I don't have internet in my new house yet.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

NaNoWriMo : Demon World part 3 & Tips 2

Yesterday I didn't write.I know that's bad, but as I said in the previous post things like "life" happen and sometimes it makes it difficult to concentrate on writing even when you want to.
But of course today I caught up.
I'm at 10061, which is not only right on track for my 2500 words per day schedule but also two days in advance for the normal NaNoWriMo schedule. The first 10000 words are easy and hard to get at the same time. Easy because the beginning of a story is mostly clear in the mind of the writer, hard because you are not yet using your potential writing inertia and you still need to go dig up for motivation looking at the mountain of words in front of you.
All Novels Drafts 

So you have to break the mountain into small pieces. Be happy with every couple of words you right. My tool to do that and this is the tip of the day is :  
Update your word count on the NaNo website every 5 minutes. 
And by that I mean, write with your NaNo stat page open, every time you take back your breath and start thinking after a sentence or a paragraph, update your word count. That way you will see it grow slowly and it's very motivating. Even 100 words more, even 50 words more deserve to be updated, because after all, all you have to do is to write an easy 100 words often enough.

Enlarge this document in a new window