Writing tips

I love XKCD, this one is great.

xkcd is 1337

but HEY...that was my secret word count increaser - when stuck with your characters make up entire sentences to keep your fingers going...

The grintolks cast an eerie eye over the munbe liome and with a glint of their reniols they GASPATCHED and mlet the sulton.

Works better with non-fiction.

wrimo tip: never listen to me

Or steal/ gain inspiration from the Monty Python boys and introdcuce a random spaceship. I'm gathering that's fairly acceptable behaviour around here.

Yup, anything that gets the words flowing. I've written in my grocery lists, notes to my muse and inner editor as well as an occasional rant. No on grades this on grammar, spelling or anything. Which is good because I'd be in big trouble if they did.

A good tip if you get bored with your characters is to kill someonbe off. Last year I killed off eight characters in about two chapters, and they were all in the same family. And it wasn't a battle or natural disaster.

Hello everyone.

I'm just trying to set up the outline of my novel in my new shiny new novel writing software, so I thought that I would first get into the swing of things by procrastinating and heading over here to annoy you all. I'd never heard of software like this before so I thought I would share it with you all here.

I came across it in a PC magazine that was reviewing a program called Scrivener, which the magazine rated as the best available for Apple users, though not quite as good as yWriter for Windows. Scrivener costs about $40, I think, while yWriter is free. It allows you to keep notes, character lists, locations lists, biographies in one project. It also stores everything by scenes so you can easily swap things about later on, and you can have detailed notes per scene, as well goals, and four variables for pacing or suspense or whatever else you would want to keep a check of.

I haven't really used it yet but it certainly seems promising to have something so much more flexible than a word document that is 50,000 words long at the end of November (keep confident!) and it is free and programmed by a published author. It also can auto back up everything periodically to aid not feeding those Monsters. For those who really want to plan everything out in advance you can very nearly have a complete novel, with themes, goals, characters and every scene neatly planned out only needing to be actually typed.

You can download it from http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4_Download.html

And now I had better get back to trying to think of what is going to happen in my novel rather than thinking about how I will type it.

Good luck, everybody, I hope this post may have some benefit to someone.

Anyone else notice that threads that I post in tend to die? Maybe its just my imagination.

A few more tips that I would like share,

if you are a bit stuck, you don't have to add at the bottom of your document. You can add stuff wherever you like, and even leave bits in the story to be filled in later. Perhaps then when you are having difficulty with one scene you can come back and fill out another scene that you only sketched out originally. I, for example, have a huge problem with dialogue, so a lot of this year's text is just dialogue. So if I really need some more words I can go back and add in a whole lot of "said the Baroness, breathlessly, trying to catch her breath against the animal attraction she felt for the dashing Orc with the deep black flashing eyes." Or something like that ;-)

If you really can't type stuff, then spell check and re-read stuff. It may not be adding to your word count but it is better than doing something not writing related. Sometimes you just get funnelled into a rut in the story that somethimes backing up a bit will take you out of. Read the forums here or elsewhere on NaNoWriMo, but do something that will keep your interest on your novel and writing in general. It is amazing what reading what other people are doing can do to your own motivation.

These are tips for people that can't attend write-ins or things like that. When you are on your own you can't afford to give up on your novel. Even if you are not actually writing, find something else to do related, not because that hour or so will ruin your NaNoWriMo, but because that hour has a tiny tendency to expand to a few days to a week and then you are buggered without ever meaning to. Keep your spare time novel orientated and soon your itch to write will more than outweigh your "I can't do this". We are all doing this exactly because we want to do this, whether we can or not hardly matters a whit next to that.