Tweet I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating for some context. I’m a 3-time NaNoWriMo winner (although last year’s probably deserves an asterisk, because I made up my own rules). 2009: 51,242 words (spread across three books and a short story) 2008: 60,080 words (Gods Tomorrow) 2007: 121,958 words (Sleeping Kings: The Shepherd) That’s […]
Tweet I talked on Tuesday about climbing mountains — about facing and overcoming an arbitrary challenge in an arbitrary amount of time, just to become a better person. And now…welcome to NaNoWriMo Week Two. For the productive among us (or just the prepared) Week One was all about the pell-mell rush into productivity, and Week […]
The infamous, oft-dreaded, murky march of NaNoWriMo Week Two is well underway. We cannot always see the path before us, and the songs are starting to fade to snatches of tune hummed nervously to the light of flickering torches…
Tweet I once said that I used to try, at least once a year, to go skiing or mountain climbing. I’m finding my unwritten memory as unreliable as ever, but to my best recollection, I’ve climbed four mountains. Walker and Wheeler in New Mexico (both peaks a one-day climb out of Red River), and two […]
Tweet Yesterday I talked about some of the pitfalls of chasing inspiration, and the importance of finishing projects. That might seem like a premature topic, less than a week into a month-long marathon, but Week One is the foundation or your noveling month. That’s why I was thanking Courtney yesterday for her comments on Wednesday. […]
Tweet I’m quite lucky to be surrounded by the kind of creative talent I am, and quite conniving to get all that talent working on my behalf. That’s something I think (and am told) fairly often, but in this case it’s because of yesterday’s guest post. With no prompting whatsoever, Courtney wrote a perfect introduction […]
Tweet NaNoWriMo is always a busy time of year, even without the 50,000 word commitment, and as my fourth NaNoWriMo kicks into gear I find myself halfway through the first semester of a graduate degree at the University of Oklahoma. I’m taking “Writing the Screenplay” which requires me to write a feature-length movie by mid-December, […]
Tweet We’ve been talking about long synopses and scene lists this week. Yesterday I went into some detail on what scene lists are for. Today I want to tell you how to write one. It shouldn’t be hard, but it’s definitely going to take some time and thought. So let’s get started! Meat on the […]
Tweet This week, your big NaNoWriMo prewriting assignment is to develop a long synopsis, or scene list. I’ve talked before about writing a plot synopsis (and all its various forms), and tucked in there is a brief description of a scene list: A scene list is primarily useful as a prewriting or editing tool. It […]
