Editing in November

I'm having a similar problem. I'm being way too precious with my words when really I should just be spewing them forth. It's going much slower than I imagined. You're doing much better than me with word count tho so well done! You'll still be fine if you continue at this rate I reckon, especially if you hit your stride and can pump out long passages in one go!

I find that if I leave myself notes about things to change, I feel better about leaving the crap writing as-is. So if I write a section and then realize that it would be a lot more interesting if I combined characters A and B, or if I removed that scene altogether and inserted it as backstory, etc. I just write a line to jog my memory and move on.

Also, last year I used Write or Die (http://writeordie.drwicked.com/) when I really needed to get words down on the page. The way it works is you set a time and a word count goal then start writing. If you pause writing, the screen will gradually turn red and then play an "evil" (aka obnoxious) sound. You can set how strict it is. I think on the strictest setting it will start deleting what you wrote if you pause for too long!

It takes some practice, but eventually I was keeping up with the "normal" strictness setting, and when you're going at that pace it's hard to do much editing. Of course, you will need to do more editing after you're done, but it helps to get stuff down. As they say, it's easier to edit a crappy first draft than a blank page!

My blog about science and space exploration - http://martianchronicles.wordpress.com

Hm... in my writing of the 'episodes' of my story, (just doing two of which this month), I already allow myself about a five-month editing buffer before I publish them. Still, since i'm also a 9-5er, my routine is to only do my 1700 or so words on weekdays, and then the same 1700 on weekend days PLUS about 5000 words editing per weekend, um, day. (for me, that's a full chapter.) I find the rhythm tends to sustain itself reasonably well.

Sometimes you want to go back and tinker with things, it can be hard to resist. Mostly what I end up doing is keeping notes of basic facts so that I don't have a reason to scroll back and re-read previous things I wrote. The less I look at it, the easier it is to just keep plowing forward. Also setting goals for each time you sit down to write helps a lot. When you're working towards that goal it's a lot easier to want to just plow forward to reach your goals.

Also when it comes to editing I personally like to distance myself from the story. I'll start writing something new, or reading some stuff that's piled up before I touch something I've previously finished. It adds a layer of objectivity because the words aren't so "fresh".

Thanks everyone. And good point about just letting it go, guinnessduck. Stephen King says he puts a novel draft away for 6 months, I think, before he revises it.

Avoiding editing is going to be tough, since I'm making this story up as I go. I honestly had almost nothing planned whatsoever, other than some of the setting and one small situation. The rest is unfolding day to day. Some aspects are clearly going to have to change as I get deeper into discovering the story. Keeping above the quota will free me to look at the story a bit.

Mike

Hi Mike,

I immediately hit ctrl-end whenever I open my nanowrimo file to keep from looking back at what I've written. Otherwise, I'll spend all day trying to make it sound less like crap. I am a big fan of writing Italic notes to myself like "Tom actually named Fred, never been to Nebraska, delete earlier passage" and then I keep going on, mentally changing the book and then going back and fixing it after November. That way you don't lose word count, and you don't lose momentum. But I agree that reading nanowrimo books on Dec 1 leads to some strange personality shifts half-way through and continuity issues and such. I worry about all that after the month is over.

Caitlin

My mom read a suggestion somewhere to turn the monitor screen off (or turn the light down really low on a laptop, I guess) so that you can't even see what you wrote before. I've never tried it, but it sounds like it'd work.

It may not work for everybody, but I personally just make a point to not read any of it.

I read a paragraph, or two, a page at most, whenever I sit down to write. I just don't read any of the rest of it. I don't really know what I'm doing this year either - so it's just going where it feels like, which is somewhere different every time.

Also, I personally don't have a laptop, so when I go to write-ins, or I'm writing from school I can't see what I've already written, so I scribble down the last two or three lines in my notebook to jog my memory when I get settled to write. If re-reading is becoming a real issue for you, you could try doing something similar, by opening a new document each time you sit down to write, or something.

Hope that helps a little!

I have a rule that I only make an edit if it will affect the events that come later in the story, or if it will add detail (and thus words).

And I've been trying to view my edits sentence-by-sentence: if I have to make a change, I try to make sure that particular sentence stays the same word count. If I can achieve the edit with just replacing a word that's cool, but if I had to delete some, I see if there's more detail in that sentence - or one of the ones next to it - that I can add.

And one of the things that Baty suggested in a pep talk was, if you've got to wipe out a whole paragraph or section, italicize it, or turn its font color white, or something. You might want to use some bits of it later, you never know, and that way you get credit for the words.

I think you've nailed it, Tammers. I've gone back and made just a couple changes when it's big. But when I decided one character would be female instead of male? I just made a note.

And about those little notes: Word count is starting to get tedious, as I attempt to highlight text around all my little notes. Anybody have a remedy for this?

I'd say just go ahead and count the notes. They are part of the novel in their own way.

My blog about science and space exploration - http://martianchronicles.wordpress.com

Definitely count the notes! (I think you can even find support for that in the official rules somewhere!)