Tactics for Reaching Great Wordcounts in Short Times!

It all depends on your writing speed. You can test it. Have an idea for a scene. Get it. Got it? Good.

Open your favourite authoring tool, and start typing the scene, as fast as you can, for 15 minutes. You are not allowed to switch to another scene. You are not allowed to stop. You are not allowed to fix spelling mistakes or typos, no matter how horrible. You are to write the scene. If you need to, go on tangents midscene, describe stuff, but WRITE THE SCENE. 15 minutes are over. How much did you type? I am hoping you got at least 300 words, but usually people can get >500. Let's try it with 500 -- you need 20 such sessions then. You can fit 3 into an hour with 5 minute break between them. Wake up bright and early, 7am. Before you start morning rituals (shower, breakfast, etc.), try having an hour of typing. 1500 words are gone, and it's 8am. Morning ritual time! It's 9am. Do the thing for 2 more hours. It's 11am, and you've got 4500 words. Try and do it until 12pm. Maybe you're tired, allow yourself some spazzing out -- but get two sessions in. 5500 words, and it's just noon! Have lunch. Enjoy it. Take your time. It's 1pm. Do sessions for 2 hours. It's 3pm, and you're 7000 words in. You're doing great. Take a break until 4pm, and now do another two hours. 9000 words in, it's 6pm, and you're on your home stretch. Take another break, and at 7pm, try again. The words will be yours!

Note that this assumes a fairly low typing speed -- most people get to 600-700 words, especially after some intense practice like the one you're getting. You're likely to overshoot 10K with such a regime :)

'07 - Digital Watches (Won!)

Another thing that helps a lot is write ins. When I am typing alone I type on average just under 3k/hour. At a 2 hour write in I do 8k words, spurred on by other NaNoer keys clacking away.

I wish I could do 4k an hour when I was on my own, but that is one reason I love write ins so.

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All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney

Moshez, you are my hero. I tried your method today, and am positively delighted in how well it works. Thanks to you, I've written 11 073 words today (and there are still 40 minutes left before midnight); I've gone to brunch, dinner, and a movie, and I've been spending time with people that hasn't allowed me to write as much as I'd actually like to on what was supposed to be a "full writing day". This is almost 4000 words higher than my previous personal best for a day, and I attribute all of those words to your method.

Thank you so much!

Moshez, you're my hero as well. I physically lost my novel and am forced to restart, and this'll be really helpful.

Junaberry, while the tactic worked wonderfully.... oh god it hurt!! All the little red lines and fragments and repetition and the ADVERBS....*shudder*....but that's what the sign over my desk is for: "NO EDITING UNTIL DEC 1st!!!" I'm finally starting to get that the only way to stay sane this month is to have a few days of just spitting out scenes like that... so thanks, kinda like a kid says thanks for cough syrup, but thanks.

I'm going to print this out, post it up, and do it tomorrow.

I write in half hour blocks, where I write 1300-1400 words, then take quarter hour breaks, and so on until I hit a target that I set for the day.

wordcount widgets

moshez, I discovered this style of writing myself this morning (and actually started a thread about it, because I hadn't seen our comment). To anyone else having problems translating ideas into decent wordcount - this absolutely works! I just wrote and wrote, and kept going till my time was up (I actually chose ten minutes as my marker). It is quite difficult at first, but when you get the hang of it you will find that in ten minutes you end up with as many words as you would in an hour of sitting and thinking about what comes next!

Here's my strategy for hitting 5 k or more per day. You must not be afraid to digress in the middle of the story.

Grab a movie from your library. It must be on DVD and must be something you've seen a million times / something that's really boring. Put it into your disk drive and hit play.

Now, get rolling. Every thousand words, you can break and watch some of the movie, pause for food, whatever. You must make those thousand words before you stop writing. (Bathroom breaks are allowed, though -- but no pausing for something else on your way back.) It doesn't matter if you write the story or halt it to talk about other stuff. You have to make 1 k before you stop, though.

This works wonderfully if you're like me and have a serious weakness for distraction. I'm planning to do this so I can get in an additional 50k by Friday -- to make a long story short, it's the only way I can make my 100k goal.

(I used Doctor Zhivago and Tombstone as the movies. Doctor Zhivago works very well, I found. It's just awfully conducive to writing.)

Senioritis -- Four men in a coffeeshop. They write a novel.
Echo Flux -- Peasant girl saves the world with SCIENCE!
(That was NaNo 07. Screnzy?)
Ballroom Blitz -- The kind of highly-meta play that gets written by a student in Tech Theatre.

1: add shootout.
2: add car-chase
3: add bizarre verbal exchange.

Eats up words, really.

Bodycount: 60

Have a character either explain to another one everything that's happened so far or do it as an internal monologue. Not only will this help you keep track of what is going on, but it really ups the word count. I've done this quite a bit. (One of my characters is currently doing that right now.)

"Be nice to the imaginary people. Don't kill too many." -- e-mail from my youngest sister, June 23, 2008

Ways in which I boost my word count?

#1 way: Dialouge! Though I write short stories and novels as well, my main writing base is comics. I'm used to reading and writing comics. In other words I am used to write straight dialouge, and nothing but dialouge. I can write dialouge for hours on end. Have characters chatting away, verbalizing everything that they are seeing, hearing, doing, and thinking.

Narrative on the other hand... ick! I get stuck on narratives. I can write them, sure, but I'd rather stick to writing pure dialouge, cause it's so much easier for me to get inside my characters heads and write everything that's going on inside there.

Here are the things that helped me out so far this year, hopefully they well help you as well:

Here is an article I wrote on killing writer's block. That might help you out some.

Also I wrote this one on creating character profiles. Some of the questions and exercises in this one might give you new things to write about your characters.

And this article on various types of narration might give you some ideas as well.

I recommend the Dare Threads from NaNoWriMo forums... There is the big one for general dares, and than each genre board has their own genre specific Dare Thread. Check out all of them, cuse you can use any dare from any genre board in any novel regardless of the genre you are writting. Whenever I get stuck on my plot I head to the Dare Thread and something over there always sparks me to write something new for my plot.

I grabbed a dare last week, and than tried to figure out how the hell I could fit a man-eating coat into my story. Here's the one I chose to use today:

I ended up writing a scene 1063 words long, about a Phooka (vampire-shapeshifter) that turned himself into a fur coat so he could lie in wait until someone put the coat on, so that he could get up close and personal with thier neck :)

Another one I chose involves a flock of killer hummingbirds attacking the townspeople (I actually came up with this one for the Dare thread myself and than used it in my own story)

And one I picked, but didn't write yet, I have to have at least one scene in each chapter where a chicken or rooster walks by the main character. (I created this Dare too)

I've got a ton of dares that I picked off of all the differant Dare threads, and when ever I feel like I can't think of something to write, I pick one of the dares, and write about it and try to fit it into the rest of my story.

Dares are just so much fun, and they boost your word count with out cheating! You have soooo got to try one.

Here's a fun writing exercise that I did. Useing this writing exercise, I was able to up my NaNoWriMo Novel word count, by a whopping 4000 words, just by having each of my characters answer this question!

I also have a copy of this book: Writers Book of Matches: 1,001 Prompts to Ignite Your Fiction. Think of it like your personal Dare Thread that you can stick in your pocket and take with you anywhere you go. No writer should be without this wonderful book.

I also have a copy of this book: The Writers Little Helper. This is just the most amazingly helpful book. Whenever I get stuck I pull it out and open a random page and start reading, and it always sparks some idea. Next thing I know I'm off and writing again. It's wonderful. If you don't habe it, you must go out and get yourself a copy. This is one of my all time fave booksa for writers.

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Copper Cockeral
Publishing Your NaNo Novel?
Do You and I Read the Same Books?

Moshez, you are my hero. I just got more done in fifteen minutes (twenty, to get the typos translated) than I usually get done in an hour. *kneels down and worships* It was the permission to go off on tangents and break the fourth wall that really did it =)

My method is similar to Moshez's. On Friday I wrote 10k and I only had 10.5 hours to do it. So before freaking out I made myself sit down and write 1,000 words. I used the word wars, but you don't have to. When that 1000 was up, I could do whatever I wanted to for the rest of the hour. But at the top of the next hour, I would sit down and write 1000 words. If you knock it out fast, then you get lots of time to relax, but if you're slow, it helps push you forwards. Decent typists can write 1000 words in 30 minutes (only 33 wpm), so you should be able to do it fairly easily without being stuck in the chair for 3 hours straight.

Nano 07:
Jamie's Dress- 75,736/50,000
Man of Honor- 29,272/50,000

Here's a trick I found to get a whole lot of words done quickly. Give your inner editor/critic a voice. You know that it's all at the surface of your head anyway. Go ahead and write what you're feeling about your book--things like why should we care, what is this character about, what is the point.

Those words are waiting to come gushing out of you. You can update this stuff every 5k or 10k or so--maybe the more progress you make, the gentler those thoughts will be. And, you can always delete them during the December edit.

moshez, thanks a lot for this post, I've gotten 3,492 words done already by using it. Actually, every day I managed to get a really great word count, it was doing this, even before I read your post. You know, parking my ass in the chair and just pounding away until I reached a word count that satisfied me. But this, spelling out a clear way of doing it, has really helped. Thanks a million.

I've fallen pretty far behind over the weeks but finding this thread has really helped me. I've gotten over 5,000 words today, much more than I usually get, and it isn't even dinner-time yet. I feel that I might make the deadline if I persist, when yesterday I was feeling pretty hopeless. (c: So, thanks for the help -- great suggestions and tips. I have to keep reminding myself it's okay to just speed write without agonizing over word choice or even necessarily where my scene/character/plot is going.

moshez, where have you been all my month? I don't know why I just decided to browse these threads with interest but I am loving this technique. I only just tried it but I had to pop back on and say thank you! I never would have written 632 words in 15 minutes on my own. cheers!

It's amazing, isn't it? I love doing that now.

This has really helped me. Every time I finished a chapter, I'd look at the white page and say..."What next?" The last few days I've been setting a timer and I just write and the characters have been moving the book for me. Of course, they're so much kinder than I am. I had planned to kill off a few people, but, my character weren't having that. So, the latest guy has been sent off on a pirate ship to who knows where.

Anyway, I'm just about at 45K, or will be when I get back to the book.

I got a new wordpress blog. I needed something to put there, so I cleaned up my post, enhanced it, and put it up: http://moshez.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/a-10k-friday-or-any-day-really/

Enjoy!

'07 - Digital Watches (Won!)

This was an excellent tip. I like the minimal planning. IF I plan too much detail, then I get stuck and can't think of a thing to write. I'll try your schedule next year. I would love to get a 20K day! Right now I'm kicking out 5000k easily with about 2 hours of writing.

READ! WRITE! Be Bravely Beautiful & full of crap!!! It gives you so much more to say!!!

It seems so elementary. But it IS so revolutionary. Bless you, moshez. 500 words in just 15 minutes with no staring blankly at the screen, just full out typing! It may be too late for me this year, but I'm not going down without a fight!

My method's pretty simple, really.

I have a timer which i set for 10 minutes. I close everything except Word and just type for 10 minutes, no matter how much it pains me. On a good day I can get out around 500 words; on a bad day, only about 200. Doesn't matter, words are words.

If I'm now "into it" and I don't want to stop, I set the timer for another 10 minutes and continue. Otherwise, I set it to 10 minutes anyway, and have a break. When it beeps again, it's time to continue writing!

Really helps get me on task. I've managed to do a day's worth in less than an hour (this may not seem much to some people, but for me it's a record XD) and I did 3k one day starting at 9 PM.

It's quite similar to other methods...I'm liking some of the ones I've seen =)

The timer method really is key. I bought a cute kitchen timer just for noveling..it looks like an alarm clock (see, a method to help crank out words and an excuse to shop). :) I set the timer for 15 minutes and just type away. I'm a pretty slow typer but I can still manage to crank out 350-400 words during that time. When the timer buzzes I check my word count and then I set the timer again. Repeat for a total of 1 hour. At the end of the hour you have at least 1400 words. My first year of NANO I was addicted to checking my word count after every sentence I wrote. That made it really hard to crank out the words. The timer method works great. You crank out the words and then you get a nice surprise when you check word count after 15 mins.

"...It's time to look Death in the face and say 'Whatever dude'." - "Hurley" LOST

Congratulations on getting your word count (I didn't, this year - my current hope is nanofimo, to make up the 12,000 I was short, and to add another 30,000 to that - can I take two months of writing?).

I was thinking about all of the tips that people in various threads have given. It seems the best answer is to turn spell checking off - but if you're using a computer for work-related things as well, don't forget to switch it back on again afterwards! To those who don't have to do 'serious' stuff on the same computer, leave it off until the 1st of December.

sheridan
nanowrimo 2007: 38,886
plus nanofimo 2007: 42,302
http://www.wildewood.co.uk/

For me it really seems to help when I set aside specific times for writing. I just tell myself that I'm going to put aside 3-4 hours (yes, I have looooooong writing sessions) that I'm not going to do homework, I'm not going to do housework, I'm not going to take any phone calls, and I'm just going to turn up my music and WRITE with no distractions. Usually I do this locked in my room or at Bread Co/Panera, but sometimes I can do it in the living room as long as everyone in my family isn't home at the same time. (We tend to all flock to the living room when the four of us are home together.)

NaNoWriMo 2008: Beloved (As of right now, anyway)
NaNoWriMo 2007: Karina — WINNER! (51K)
NaNoWriMo 2006: A Raven's Song — Miserable failure. We don't talk about it.

Writing Blog: http://xxdaqu.blogspot.com
E-Mail: xxdaqu@gmail.com