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Hi, I'm Angela, a girl with a blog on five different psyches:
girl, geek, reader, writer, gamer
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NaNoWriMo: a retrospective

Inkwell writingThis year, NaNoWriMo ended up being rather interesting for me. I’ve “won”–I reached 50,000 words, and it’s definitely a more promising story than what I had when I last won in 2007.

But will I go back to this story this December?

Nope.

But that doesn’t mean, though, that I feel I’ve “lost” again this year. In 2007, I came out of it pretty much the same as I went in, just with 50,000+ words of a story that was unfinished, with no real desire to finish it.

This year, I come out of it with only a little over 50,000 words, half likely crap, of a story–but with better writing habits and better belief in myself.

Additionally, remember when I said I didn’t have the longevity to write a novel? I think I’ve just had proof that I don’t. I was thinking about this for a while this morning, and I’ve realized that I am generally not a marathon kind of person. I’ve always competed in sprints back in school; I loved web development because there were no long compiles and the UI was just there and easily built up. I like sprinting. It’s what probably drew me to NaNoWriMo in the first place: a novel sprint. But that doesn’t always work out well, because a novel is a long and involved process.

Does that mean I’ll give up ever writing a novel? No. But not now.

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5:30 AM Writing

I’ve started a new habit: I wake up at 5:30 AM to write.

The alarm goes off at 5:25 AM, and then I drag myself out of the bed to fire up my computer, open StoryMill, hit Command-Shift-F for full-screen, and start typing away. I haven’t gone through the ones I’ve written yet, but they’re usually just a couple of paragraphs each, with typos all over the place (I hear Typinator going off about once every other minute, correcting my typos). That’s what happens when I type with sluggish hands and with my eyes closed.

Why am I doing this? Basically for two things:

  1. to train my body to write creatively again, and
  2. to find out which kind of writing I instinctively fall back on when most of myself is still not functioning properly.

I got this activity from Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. I seem to remember talking about this a long while ago, but as I can’t find that entry, I must be dreaming (I swear I’m fully awake now though). In chapter 5 of the book, she tells us that we “must teach the unconscious to flow into the channel of writing”.

So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can–and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before–begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before; a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically. The excellence or ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet…your primary purpose now is not to bring forth deathless words, but to write any words at all which are not pure nonsense.

And so I write. I’ve actually “cheated”, and I think I know the answer to #2 (what writing type I fall back on) but we’ll see how this goes. In any case, I don’t see any pattern yet in my morning writing; it should come out in a month or so, I’m gauging.

The good thing? As early as now, I feel like I’m finding what my writing voice is. I already know, in a way, but I’ve written in the same “voice” at least thrice already (and I only started this week). Writing while my brain’s still muddled with sleep has its rewards, for all it’s difficult to get words in order sometimes. :D

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