jessicasteiner: (Default)
No, really. I honestly forgot. I also wrote a lot of words.

I have 17,083 words, which I'm proud of! Nyla has finally figured out she has superpowers, and is pretty sure she knows how they work, however crazy and illogical it might be. Time to ruin her life! But that'll wait until tomorrow.

Today's tip: When you screw up, strikeout is your friend.

I try not to go back and revise, but sometimes you have a really amazing idea for a better way for a scene to go. It does take a while to edit, and I strongly discourage people from spending much time doing this. You can spend an hour going over a scene and only add a few words, or even lose them. That's an hour you could have been adding to your wordcount.

But sometimes you just have to. In cases like that, don't ever delete words you wrote. Strike through them (It's ctrl-shift-minus sign in Scrivener) and write the new thing. Of course, you might find bits of what you wrote before that you want to keep and fiddle around with, which is fine, but at least you won't lose the bits you actually don't want to keep.

They still count for your NaNoWriMo words, so don't rob yourself by using the delete key.
jessicasteiner: (NaNoWriMo: Logic)
Today I wrote chapter two of my new novel, and added another 2200 words to my pile.



I've learned something about myself already, and it's only the second day: I believe I'm an outliner when it comes to plot, but I'm a pantser when it comes to characters. This is a thing that's possible! I think the only reason I didn't realize it before is because I've always heard of planner vs. pantser as being an all or nothing thing. Sure, some people are more organized, more pantsy than others, but I've never heard anyone say they divide things up this way.

Here's why I believe it's true: I've been planning The Geek Club for about a year, at least. Some aspects I've been working on for longer. It has been through two major incarnations, and I have incorporated an entirely different novel (which I trunked halfway through the planning process).

The planning process had been halted for a while, but in July I had a flash of inspiration to take the book in a whole different direction. At that point I had a general idea for plot, and several characters. Since July I've completed a full plot outline and written a tonne of worldbuilding notes.

Three days before NaNoWriMo started, I was still cudgelling my brain, trying to come up with villains.

I had one villain who wasn't going to be important until probably the third novel. I had several sub-plots that suggested antagonists I needed to come up with, and I couldn't come up with anything.

Over the years, I've tried lots of different methods for developing characters. I would try questionnaires, write pages and pages of great info, and nearly all of it would get thrown out when I started the book. Whenever I was writing, I'd either completely forget about things I came up with in the questionnaire, or I would find it confining.

Today and yesterday, after a week of struggling to come up with something, anything that would constitute an antagonist for my story (other than faceless organizations), three living, breathing characters walked onto the page to interact with my main characters without any effort at all. I don't know everything about them, but they're great characters and I'm excited about them. And I feel like now that they exist I can flesh them out.

So my tip today is: Everyone does it differently. Figure out what works for you, and do that. Keep an open mind, and don't assume that what works for other people is the only way to do it.
jessicasteiner: (NaNoWriMo)
Today I started a brand new story, which I've dubbed The Geek Club. It's about a group of geeky females who get powers and become superheros. Also vampires, werewolves, and Lovecraftian horrors.

I completed chapter one, in which my main character, Nyla, and her twin brother Nolan, meet their respective roommates. For some reason, the roommates don't seem to like each other. But Nyla's sorority-obsessed roommate, Kailey, seems really excited to meet them.

Wordcount so far: 2003/50,000!

Tip of the day: I saw this on tumblr, and used it for the first time today.

Sometimes when you're writing along, you suddenly run across a detail that you need to think about. For example, today I realized that I never actually worked out what school Nyla goes to. It's a pretty important detail that's going to take a lot of research. I might need to pick a real school, or to make up a fake school so I can manipulate the details however I like.

For a second, I pulled up Google, but then I realized that if I wanted to do all this research, it was really going to cut into my writing time, which is pretty precious!

So instead, all I did was call it 'elephant university' and move on.

Any time you come across a detail like that, where figuring it out will interrupt your flow with research or a lot of thinking, just put in the word 'elephant' and keep going. When you're done writing for the day, maybe you can go back and do the research, or wait until your draft is finished and fill it in on the revision.

Either way, the point is to just keep writing for the month of November.

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Jessica Steiner

February 2016

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