Week Two Hell

measure_in_love

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Hello All,

So I know a few of us are already having trouble just getting into week two. I figured I'd make this thread to support one another, and bounce ideas off to keep everyone motivated and not quit. So what are week two problems people are already experiencing?
For me, it's not going back and editing and deleting everything I hate. That inner editor of mine is quite frankly, (excuse my language) a bitch. And then of course getting frustrated because of that and quitting. Now I know this week always comes with a warning because many people drop out and get frustrated. Any tips and tricks of the trade to keep motivated?

:)
 

Pandora Lee

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Definitely with you. And by "everything I hate" I mean "pretty much everything I've written so far." :p

Um... I liked Neil Gaiman's pep talk. I dunno. I'm not so much motivated as stubbornly slogging through, one 15-minute word war at a time... at <300 words per. Don't get me started on how everyone else word-warring appears to be approximately twice as fast as me. :/
 

Ellielle

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I don't exactly hate everything I've written, but I have been noticing a steady decline in the quality as I get farther and farther along. Stuff I'm writing now seems borderline random, because I didn't set things up properly in earlier scenes, and even the sentence-level writing has deteriorated to being full of adverbs and filtering. Blech.

How I keep myself motivated is to remember that, basically, all of this stuff I hate? Will still be there at the beginning of December to delete if I still want to. I'm not really losing opportunities by postponing said deleting until later. However, if I delete it now, I am losing opportunities. And as for resisting trying to go back and fix it now, I remind myself that, no matter how tempting, finishing the entire thing will give me an entirely different perspective on what needs to be fixed and not. Until I've got something complete to fix, fixing little bits will be a waste of my time--I might spend days fixing something that I'll realize later was completely unneccesary in the first place.

Also, I like seeing the little bar for my word count get more full. And I'm competitive and can't stand to lose.
 

Putputt

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Like Ellielle, for the past couple of days, I'd been experiencing a steady decline in the quality of words written...mostly because I'd come to the part of the book where my plot outline became fuzzy. When I was plotting, I thought I'd come up with things while writing the book, but nope.

I sat down last night and forced myself to do a proper plot outline, and that helped...thinking about the book is no longer making my butt sweat so much.
 

moreferarum

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I'm definitely noticing a decline in the quality of my writing too. I don't even know why but I just let myself type it anyway and then add a comment such as 'change this in december' - that's going to be a fun month!
 

Catalyn

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I felt like I was beginning to slump a little in quality and enthusiasm a couple of days ago. A few things have helped so far.

First, I have a short bullet pointed list at the end of the document where I'm typing. This is a list of future scenes I think I'll write, and I add anything that pops into my head during writing, or anything random that I've thought of during the day. I phrase them in a way that makes them sound completely awesome, so that I can't wait to write them. So instead of "character X does Y", my list says "wouldn't it be amazing if character X did Y, and then more stuff happens!!!" (yes there is even exclamation mark abuse). I don't ever write out of order, so I end up looking forward to when I can get to these scenes and write them out properly. Before I started the list I hadn't outlined anything beyond a rough ending, so this has also helped keep my story on track.

Keeping the editor at bay has always been difficult for me, and I've found more than a few things I need to change so far. Don't be tempted to go back and change whole scenes, just add a quick note. I realised last night that during a previous scene, I'd completely forgotten to mention an important plot point that needed to happen. I wrote a quick note at the end of the scene and carried on as if I'd written it in all along. Similarly, a later scene almost totally invalidated one of the earlier scenes of the novel, so I went back and added a "scrap or change this later" note right at the beginning.

I've won Nano once before (many years back!), and I remember in that one I sat for ages with no idea how to write a particular scene that needed to happen so I could move on. I ended up writing something like <insert amazing scene here where X happens and character Y does this> and then all was well in the world. :)

I've attempted Nano almost every year since then and have always lost enthusiasm and failed around this time, sometimes even earlier. This time around, I have a much better word count, a clear idea of what I'm writing and I'm pretty sure I'll finish. These are the things I have done differently this year, so hopefully someone else can find them useful too. :)

.... we can count forum posts about Nano towards the word count, right?
 

VeronicaX

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This weekend will be really hellish for me of private reasons, so I haven't got anything written today :( I can't concentrate and I wonder if I will be able to at all until Monday. And my story has taken a turn which I'm regretting immensely and I feel blah about the whole thing. *sighs*

Where is that time machine so I can skip to Monday already? *pouts*
 

Pandora Lee

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Yeah, the only reason I can make myself plow ahead instead of going back to fix things, is that I can recognize that I don't really know enough to completely fix things yet. I'm still figuring out who these characters are, and what their core conflicts are. And I think I'm only going to be able to do that by writing them together... then maybe I'll be able to rewrite their individual introductions.

Sigh. It just bugs me that this is going so much less smoothly than my last WIP, when my characters were starting to gel by the first chapter. :/
 

BBBurke

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I think the more words you write in a shorter period of time the harder it is to have any perspective to judge them. I try not to even figure out if I hate what I wrote or not - I'll probably be wrong. I don't even worry about what I might want to change - because that will change as I go.

A month's not really that long a time (good and bad), so just hold off the second guessing until the end. In the meantime, keep writing!
 

vitani

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I'm finding that writing out of order is really helping me. But having said that, I'm dreading getting to the end and not having any gaps left to fill. I'll be flailing around for something to write to bring up my word count then.

But for now, I'm writing the scenes I'd initially pictured when I first came up with the story idea, and as I'm writing those, the scenes in between are slowly taking shape in my mind.

As for my inner editor, I'm just telling her to leave me alone. That I'll sort her out when the first draft is done. As a natural procrastinator, it's getting easier - I'm so used to thinking I'll come back to something later that I'm finding that mindset is already there with writing.
 

measure_in_love

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these ideas are all great! I agree with basically everything everyone said above. Especially the quality of the writing diminishing as I continue.

Today I found a new trick: I let my inner editor, edit. Without erasing anything. I picked a different color and in italics after the sentence I felt needed changing, I reworded. Without deleting a thing. That way, my word count goes up, and it gets my need to edit every little detail out of my system for a bit. I mean let's be honest, though we all itch to edit, once you do it for a long time, it gets tiring. So that's what I did. I wore her out. Just let herself go ragged for an hour rewriting sentences next to the original.

And once she was out of the way, I got back to where I left off. Now my new tactic at the moment is to write these mundane little things my characters do in between scenes when I'm not quite sure about pacing. Which I'm really not yet. That'll be left for December, too. So that's what I've been dealing with lately. So I guess we'll see how this continues.

Any other tricks you guys learned while battling week two?
 

SianaBlackwood

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I hate everything I'm writing now, but I'm more or less resigned to it. I know it's going to look better when it's finished and I've left it to sit for a month or so.
 

Foley

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:cry: 11,600 :cry:

Like, I'm hammering away at my keyboard when I become aware of some low and ponderous cello music, a shadow falls over my notebook, I can feel warm breath on the skin aback my neck... it's subplot strand 7.

"You'll never tie all this together" he says, "Until you work out how I fit in."

I hate him, but he's right. Aaaargh! A day of plan revision is followed by a day of car trouble and a day of [whisper it] real work and suddenly my projected finish date is some day in August 2019.

I love my story, I do, but it's one of those bdsm affairs that rarely end well.

To all you other WriMos, treasure your pet chapters, value your fattened word counts, but spare a thought for those of us who got mixed up with THE PLOT FROM HELL!
 

measure_in_love

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:cry: 11,600 :cry:

Like, I'm hammering away at my keyboard when I become aware of some low and ponderous cello music, a shadow falls over my notebook, I can feel warm breath on the skin aback my neck... it's subplot strand 7.

"You'll never tie all this together" he says, "Until you work out how I fit in."

I hate him, but he's right. Aaaargh! A day of plan revision is followed by a day of car trouble and a day of [whisper it] real work and suddenly my projected finish date is some day in August 2019.

I love my story, I do, but it's one of those bdsm affairs that rarely end well.

To all you other WriMos, treasure your pet chapters, value your fattened word counts, but spare a thought for those of us who got mixed up with THE PLOT FROM HELL!

I'm right there with ya Foley! I've had this idea in my head since last year. Just writing a full first draft now, and only just past 17k yesterday (taking a mental break today after a long day with doctors).

On another note, I've heard about people outlining in the middle of NaNo when they get stuck. Has anyone done that? How do you do it in such little time?
 

rwm4768

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I haven't been having any week two problems surprisingly. I knocked out a good 7,000 words today.
 

Putputt

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On another note, I've heard about people outlining in the middle of NaNo when they get stuck. Has anyone done that? How do you do it in such little time?

I did that a few days ago. I usually have the skeleton of an outline before I start writing the book, but the outline inevitably changes as I write. New characters pop into life and demand bigger roles. The plot twists itself until I can no longer tell where the heck it's going.

That's when I took a break from writing, sat down with a pillow to scream into once in a while, and rewrote the outline. It took me about 2 hours to come up with an outline for the 2nd half of the book.

It's worth a try. Just write out in bullet points what has happened in your book so far. When you come to the point where you're stuck at, think about what your characters might do. Write the questions down. "How is the bunny going to escape the hippo's clutches?" "And then what happens?" it helps me to see my confusion written down because then I can keep track of them and tackle them one question at a time.

Hope that helps! :)
 

MaggieAmada

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NanoWriMo Outlining

On another note, I've heard about people outlining in the middle of NaNo when they get stuck. Has anyone done that? How do you do it in such little time?

I did this over the weekend. Hubby got me Scrivener for my birthday and I moved all my work so far to it and outlined while I was at it. It helped a lot. I still get stuck at times because I don't like what's coming out of my head but at least I know its heading in the right direction and there is a foreseeable end.
 

measure_in_love

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I did that a few days ago. I usually have the skeleton of an outline before I start writing the book, but the outline inevitably changes as I write. New characters pop into life and demand bigger roles. The plot twists itself until I can no longer tell where the heck it's going.

That's when I took a break from writing, sat down with a pillow to scream into once in a while, and rewrote the outline. It took me about 2 hours to come up with an outline for the 2nd half of the book.

It's worth a try. Just write out in bullet points what has happened in your book so far. When you come to the point where you're stuck at, think about what your characters might do. Write the questions down. "How is the bunny going to escape the hippo's clutches?" "And then what happens?" it helps me to see my confusion written down because then I can keep track of them and tackle them one question at a time.

Hope that helps! :)

Thanks for the tip PutPutt :) I have a quite detailed outline to where I'm up to so far, but I like your idea to outline what has happened to figure out thorny plot points. After taking a break from writing yesterday, I think this might bring back my sanity.
 

Foley

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This is my first full length novel and I'm a learnin' as I go. I had quite a detailed plan going in, but apart from working out better how my dog forsaken sub plots impact on the main plot points, it's going quite well - I'm just pantsing it with the occasional check to see where I am on the plan.

One thing I've found is that I'm going to have a lot more than 50k words by the time the first draft is fully finished, but that'll change in the editing anyway.

Also, I'm allowing myself to riff around the outline without beating myself up (too much). Right now, I'm just putting words down in blocks of about 500 and I'm hoping that'll help when it comes to refining them.

Forza, everyone, you're not alone! :)

Foley, 18,900 words
 
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meowzbark

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My quality isn't suffering as much as my will to keep putting words on the paper is suffering. I'm feeling burned out, but I don't want to give up. I took off yesterday to catch up on sleep and I'm hoping to catch up tonight.

Maybe its the fact that I was slightly ahead - my muse doesn't want to work unless we HAVE to. Freaking procrastinating muse....now we're behind.
 

Foley

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Whip that muze, meowzbark. It works and they like it!
 

measure_in_love

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Foley I might as well be pantsing it too even with a detailed outline. Though maybe it wasn't as detailed as I thought it was, it might have covered about 40-50 pages, but that's it. I know what I want a couple of scenes at the end to look like, but not how to get there. I basically did the same thing you did was pants it while looking at the outline as I went along to see where I was. I still haven't written anything today or yesterday. I'm at 17k. I seriously need to regroup and get myself back in mentally. Week 2 is seriously a killer of WriMos.