NaNoWriMo General

>First off, what are you writing?
I have problems with getting the beginning of the "story of female guts: origins" right. Unfortunately instead of concentrating on this, the idea of creating a webnovel based on the half-god children of a god from another story fascinates me. It would be basically about their broken family and rivalries among themselves, open ended, but I would never start until I have at least one arc ready.

But I first really, really finish my thesis before I think about such silly ideas.

No more than a paragraph and/or a handful of threads for later chapters.

Went the 1,668 words the day before yesterday but decided to eventually just write 1,000 (or 1,300 tops on a good day)

My book is too big for NaNoWriMo so I just wanna have the outline done by the end of the year. I'm a firm believer in doing the outline first with the actual story second, for a number of reasons: less plot holes, easier to avoid writer's block, etc.

My synopsis:

>In the futuristic industrial city of New Shanghai, a shocking burglary turns a disaffected former metalworker into the Iron Skull, a brutal and bloodthirsty vigilante with his sights set on organized crime.

Well, as this is my 6th attempt at the same story, I've got everything planned out and, hopefully, it's finalized

>First off, what are you writing?
a fairly simple plot I think that' I'm kind of writing on the fly.
MC reeling from the death of his sister gets drunk and has a one night stand at a Halloween party. turns out the girl he banged was a witch and by sleeping with her, he gained the power to turn into a cat.
now he and the girl must run away from Hansel and Gretel who have become immortal witch hunters.
then something about the sister being killed by the twins cause she was in a similar position, like I said I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants here.

I've been technically working on this story for about a year (inital version was posted on Veeky Forums, actually, been through several revisions since then), but I don't have a formal outline. I have some random design documents with bits and pieces of what will happen on them, but most of the story is contained in my head.

I try to let my characters breathe, and sometimes they make the story take a little detour.

what the fuck is this? a book by numbers?

Oh shit, it's the fourth of november and I still haven't started writing. I'm fucked.

It's an outline for my story. I cover all the points and thoughts I want to convey as well as a sort of play-by-play of what happens.

I only just started. I was busy for the first couple of days.
On my first attempt I didn't start until the 7th.

>writing ~1100 each day
>probably won't finish because of this
>if I push I project 45k words

I don't know, if I push more the writing quality will suffer.

NaNoWriMo is all about that. Ignore the quality, produce quantity.

I admire your dedication to planning. However, I feel it's equally possible to avoid plotholes just by writing the damn thing and being critical during the editing process.

I'm ahead of schedule for now

Hardly got anything done one day 1, had trouble sleeping and was too groggy up until about late last night and had enough of a burst of creative energy to pound out 3.8k words in 5 hours.

Right now I'm working on character design sketches and a decent summary before I jump back into it, though.

See, I'm a firm believer that with longer, more involved stories, its a good idea to plan things out as much as possible, but your PDF seems to have a lot of tedious over-planning which is often a form of procrastination; you work so hard on sketching out every minor detail of every event that you never end up actually writing the story. Outline the major stuff in as minimal detail as possible, then edit to iron out your plot holes and such.

Yousonofabitch

I probably could be there, but I wasted a lot of my writing energy getting way too involved in my warm-ups last week and spewed out a 9k word first person backstory for one of my characters in addition to 3.1k word smut.

I am in no way in hell ever going to hit 50,000 words.

I am however going to use this fucking month to at least practice my prose and try to write something that has a halfway comprehensible story and plotline.

I have an idea. I've written some stuff for the idea but I'm going to buckle down and actually try to outline it properly to get it really going.

But does that account for writer's block?

Time writing smut is time well spent.

I don't really believe in writers block, to be honest. Or at least, it doesn't affect me. I'm more prone to burn-out than block. If it ever hits me, I skip whatever I'm writing when it struck and move on to the next point that excites me. Even in this work I'm up to chapter nine, but chapter five just reads: "Bad guy chapter." I'll write it later, when I feel more inspired to do something with that point-of-view.

That probably sounds terribly sloppy to a dedicated planner like yourself, but there really isn't such a thing as an error you can't fix in post.

>have years of notes for novel stacked up in room
>have dozens of documents which are essentially outlines for chapters or entire novels on desktop
>never have time or motivation to put this shit together

I think this month is the month I do it. Despite all my upcoming college work I think I'm gonna have enough free time to do something with this.

> Already three days behind
Oh where has my free time and motivation gone?

If you can manage 45 then you can do 50.

There's always time buddy.
I'm just making final preps on Bio and placement for my stories WIPs.
1- Is a fast-paced, hard-hit, futuristic story about a Suit that's ready to go push Speed, Strength and Durability to its limit to stop the Hells and Massive distortions within the Three Planets
And
2- A Old's Tale based off dark fantasies and myths about an unknown who traverses graves and fallen quarters with some help and hinders in uncovering the keystones needed for granted entry for the Kingdoms Bridge that all fiends want to become the bearer of crossover upon all realms

Yo, Veeky Forums got a discord for NaNo going and we agreed to invite you guys.

discord.gg/6AwKHGF

Thanks m8.

Why are you talking about electric cars

Because brainstorming.

How do you guys come up with your ideas?

Any genre generators or anything?

I had an idea for an RPG rulebook today, would that qualify?

Life t b h.

Pick a genre you like. Pull from philosophy, history, ow your own experiences and throw that into the mix.

If you're completely out of ideas,you might be able to find some writing prompts to draw inspiration from, but those are usually only good for short stories.

I tend to go " what would be a cool thing" and start rolling around other cool things that I like into it

I just listened to a lot of Perturbator

Thinking of writing in a setting I was gonna use for a campaign that never worked out, since I wanted to give everyone familiars as part of the flavor but couldn't figure out how to balance that. Obviously it's less of a problem in a story.

A story centered around a boy who has an extremely unhealthy obsession with cleanliness (irony intentional). He is isolated from friends as a result of this, because he has made being clean into an art. When things suddenly change in the town around him, he starts noticing that everyone is getting filthy, more than normal. When trying to confront the issue, he is brushed aside. Confident his life is going to end, he prepares to end his suffering. That's when a scientist from a different world comes to him with the answer to the mystery of the sudden filth and disgusting habits springing up: an alien race is using their powers to influence people to be messier and filthy, to generate 'Dirty Energy'. As a normal person, the boy lacks the strength to engage the evil aliens. But, with the help of the scientist's technology, the boy becomes Super Maid, the girl who is going to cleanse the earth of the Muck Demons once and for all.

Sounds like a power rangers episode

Essentially the driving force behind my story. A sentai-based story with all the tropes and bullshit power levels of the genre

You. I like you.

>still writing on the first chapter where the story hasn't even really started yet

I feel like I'm cheating so that's why I'm doing my best to write 1700+ words every day to make up for it.

#wew

Already designed a hierarchy for the Alien Race, to include specialized classes for the knights, generals, and Overlords. The Supreme Leader is the most powerful of the Demons, ruling over the other Muck Demons with an honest heart and unwavering strength. The kid with the transformation device will be only able to fight the lowly peons to begin, his strength as the Super Maid extremely weak. The device will gain strength and abilities through the absorption of the Demon's cores, enabling the kid to become stronger and slowly overcome his own crippling fears. There is a planned history between the Doctor and Muck Demons, for a dark twist near the end. It will be a typical, Shonen hero sentai tale

The best way to generate ideas is to start small and go big.

Robert Pirsig once described this to a student. He'd assigned her an essay in which she was to creatively describe a street in her town. The student came back and said she couldn't think of anything to write about.

So Pirsig told her to pick a building in her town. Describe the building. If she couldn't describe the building generally, describe it piece by piece. He told her to start at the top-left brick.

You really ought to try it. Pick a subject, any subject, and start writing about it in the most specific terms possible. As you write you'll find yourself naturally travelling outwards into a larger perspective. In no time at all you'll have pages and pages of your building, street, town, people, and so on. Pick the best bits and work with those.

This is basically what I'm doing. I want to write a story about someone buying a farm in the Alps and then live the life of a farmer.
I started with him buying the farm and then traveling until he reaches the farm, meets the mayor, signs the contracts and then sees the farm for the first time.
20 pages and 8000 words in and no actual farming has happened. I try to describe everything. The story develops naturally from it.

>The story develops naturally from it.
Eh, careful with that. Descriptions are great and they're useful for developing ideas, but even the dryest story has some sense of forward movement. You can't describe your way into a plot with meaningless details.

Unless you're the ghost of Herman Melville. Then I'll be quiet and let you work.

I actually spend most of the time describing actions and people talking. I think I could spend even more time describing things and it would be okay.
Although I will probably pick up the speed later on when the protagonist has settled in and started farming.

so I'm planning on writing a urban fantasy tale set around the city of Cambridge.
what I mainly have to ask is what's a accepted level of disconnect from the real place that I can get. like can I have a building over in Guelph that isn't there in the real world or a make believe business in the place of another? it's my first time really doing any of this so if it sounds stupid I'm sorry.

That's retarded.

45 is already pushing much more than I would normally.

I think about ideas then I write them.

If you think it's retarded, don't participate.

It's like going to someone else's parry and complaining about the cake.

Make believe businesses are fine, but be careful about the geography of a real place. If its too sloppy you'll be called out on it.

I'm writing a story set in my home town, and getting the geography right is important.

First, I start with maids. Then I decide how to make it original.

No I'm saying arguing that only quantity matters, even in the context of NaNoWrMo is retarded. I could write 5 million words of repetitive text.

It's better to have too much than too little when it comes time to edit. Editing is as much about whittling the text down to an iron core of quality.

>I could write 5 million words of repetitive text
Oh it's you again. Never mind, I'm wasting my time talking to you.

>That's retarded.

Well, they didn't really elaborate.

>Ignore the quality, produce quantity.

NaNo is basically just to get people writing. You see a lot of people in these threads and elsewhere talking a bout their ideas or how they're intricately planning stuff out, and that's the problem a lot of writers have. They'll kick an idea around forever and never get it out because they feel it's not good enough and want to keep building it.

Its the same thing as Inktober's focus on ink drawings, since you can't erase ink. Create, don't nitpick and dwell on mistakes, just buckle down and do it- you can always fix your errors when you're done.

It's become a meme over the past few years due to social media so a lot of people do go for quantity over quality and write hot garbage they'll never look at again just to give themselves a pat on the back, but you're essentially supposed to use it as a disciplinary tool to allow you to go from idea to progress.

That's the entire point of NaNo though, to force yourself to push through the daunting task of actually getting a significant amount of words on paper.

Obviously your first attempt, or second or third or fourth won't be good. Learning persistence and the ability to keep going even when you feel the drain is more important to learn before worrying about really nailing quality.

>not typing millions of words to strengthen your fingers and improve your typing speed

Get a load of this pleb!

>It's better to have too much than too little when it comes time to edit. Editing is as much about whittling the text down to an iron core of quality.
There is a point where text becomes irredeemably bad and editing doesn't help. Disregarding quality entirely is silly.

>There is a point where text becomes irredeemably bad and editing doesn't help
That's a load of horse shit.

Sounds like you don't know what the fuck you're on about and are just making excuses for being lazy.

>That's a load of horse shit.
I point you towards a good 50% of what is submitted to NaNoWrMo. Unless you are confusing editing with "rewriting in its entirety".

>I point you towards a good 50% of what is submitted to NaNoWrMo
Most writers are shit whether they write five words or five thousand.

You can point to your arse and I'd find it more credible. You continually miss the point of the event and have zero understanding of the editing process.

Show me what you wrote.

Feeling good anons. I've been writing short stories and I'm getting the third one down. It's based off a session I ran that spiraled and went on tangents so often but came together beautifully.

I hit 2200, having only started today.
Glad I prepped and have an outline of a sort.
I know I can win nano, but I want to actually finish the story this time.

Good make-up for that; sometimes it takes a while to get a feel for the basis of a story, no matter how big or small the hurdle is in showing it off to the reader. But when you do get that monkey off your back, it is smooth sailing for the rest of your tales to tell... till the next one.

Godspeed, user.

I was thinking about writing a short story collection for NaNoWriMo 2017 as well. I have a whole year of collecting ideas.

Thanks user for the support. First is Fantasy, second is kinda Superheroish, and the next is Urban Fantasy based off a UA oneshot.

Up to 3,500 words. Not worrying about the count or how long it takes. Just trying to jump start a writing routine.

>woke up at 10am
>my prof was sick so no classes
>"wow, I'm just gonna try out Far Cry 4 then head to my favourite coffeeshop to write all day"
>just stopped playing Far Cry now, have a massive headache
>my coffeeshop is closing in a half an hour

I guess it's time to kill myself.

One of my biggest hurdles for writing is support, honestly. I share my work, and almost none of my friends bother to read it, or if they do, never let that be known.

I'm still churning out words, but man, this is making me depressed.

Post it here brother, we'll read it.

Since I can't seem to put together the energy to actually write, I'll dump some of the music I listen to while writing.

Fantasy:
youtube.com/watch?v=glXeCbFjh-o
youtube.com/watch?v=0g1jZONQ_Jo
More general:
youtube.com/watch?v=X6neFKE4yaE
youtube.com/watch?v=S3H8y4ohO-s
youtube.com/watch?v=NHqxducdkcc
youtube.com/watch?v=GSdYPkgCvtE

>Have all these ideas
>Can't actually put the time in for writing
>I just never start

God damn it.

I'm tempted to rewrite Star Wars as a fantasy story. Just to sort of get the juices flowing, and write something 'easy'.

My problem is that I want to write, and I like making stories, but I find the actual act so damned difficult. I've had Scrivener open for about two weeks and have barely done anything.

>they're all writing genre fiction
You don't fucking say

Hey I'm writing a scifi game! I've already got a rule set but I made that from before.

I hit trouble though. I get an idea and that idea goes for only two or three sentences no matter how complex it is. At this point the majority of my work is making fart noises with your lips.

Anyone got some good Youtube videos or anything?
I've been finding some channels like "Lessons from the Screenplay" and "Every Frame a Painting" have good advice that's transferable to writing as much as cinematography and scriptwriting.

Stigma against genre fiction is childish. People should write what they enjoy, not some "literature".

>Stigma against genre fiction is childish.
If the price of not being labelled "childish" is tolerating the indefensibly low standards of genre fiction I'll tattoo "childish" onto my fucking chest.

It's not like being outside of genre fiction somehow makes your work better.

I agree.

>I'm tempted to rewrite Star Wars as a fantasy story
Star Wars is already a fantasy story, don't let the spaceships fool you.

Michael Chabon thinks you're a cunt, and he has a Pulitzer to wave in your face too.

>Michael Chabon thinks you're a cunt
He has that in common with most people I know.

>and he has a Pulitzer to wave in your face too.
Okay?

I know, but I meant a real fantasy story.
Like I said, the idea is essentially to do something easy to pop my cherry. I'd then likely do a second draft that completely redoes everything to be less boilerplate Hero's Journey.

What the fuck else can one write besides genre fiction?

I'm and I've got nothing against genre fiction, it's just not what I read or enjoy. My problem is that the common opinion, especially among those who like genre fiction, is that literary fiction is pretentious and since that's what I'm writing I'll probably come of as pretentious to the fellow writers of my region, even if all I want to do is discuss writing in general, because I inevitably make "obscure" references.

You'll only come off as pretentious if you act pretentiously. Don't wank yourself off and no one will give a shit.

Literary fiction is often genre fiction that desperately doesn't want to be called genre fiction, is the thing. I'm not really even sure what qualifies something as being "literary" fiction as opposed to "genre" fiction.

>ask them if my references to egyptian mythology, ancient tragedies, and modern philosophy are too crude, which is one of my biggest worries right now
>"huh?"
>"nevermind"
>"I really like your talking animals"
>"Yeah, the beetle is meant to represent Khepri and the MC's struggle with solipsism."
I guess I'm just a big a wanker.

Works that transcend genre in its representation of a theme or idea, really.

There's plenty of genre fiction that does that. In fact, I'd say that most genre fiction belongs to more than a single genre.

But those works can still be said to be of a genre. Take Lolita for example. Or pretty much anything by DFW. They might have a few traits from a couple of genres, but can't be said to belong to any one of them.

>I guess I'm just a big a wanker.
It kind of sounds like you are.

That greentext is probably nothing like reality but if it's remotely like that it's not a good way to go about it.

It's pretty much how I default in topics of discussion. My problem is that if I'm not very passionate about what I'm speaking of, my anxiety prevents me from speaking at all, of course I'm aware that the things I tend to speak about are largely uninteresting or pretentious so I mostly end up not speaking.

I find that when I write, I have trouble writing what I can best call the "narrator thought/critique". The only way I seem to be able to do it is what I can only think off as a very cynical Pratchett style, which is completely at odds with what I'm trying to achieve. (A more serious story about someone trying to come to terms that she may be a prophet/joan d'arc figure for a religion that she doesn't adhere to). However, since I'm having trouble writing the not-conversations, it ends up looking more like the script for a movie/play/whatever, ie

SCENE: THERE ARE THESE OBJECTS, AND THESE CHARACTERS. IT'S SUNNY.
>character A, scared: "blablabla"
>character B, reassuring: "bla"
>character A, not reassured: blah!"
Insert character c with much noise
>character C: "BLA!"

What's.... How do I get over this. (English is not my native language which makes explaining this problem slightly more annoying, since I'm having trouble explaining it in my own language too)