NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo Prep

Are you participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year? It starts this Saturday (November 1st) and is a mad dash to write 50,000 words of a novel in one short month! I participated for the first time last year and loved it. It’s true, I was a big snob about NaNoWriMo before I…

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Five Things I Learned From Doing NaNoWriMo

It’s been nine months since I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and wrote 50,000 words of a novel in under a month. It’s one thing to bask in the manic euphoria of pounding out 50,000 words like an intense sprint around a track. But it’s completely different thing to step back and look at…

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NaNoWriMo Update: Week Two (and a Half)

It’s seventeen days into NaNoWriMo and I’ve crossed the halfway threshold. But before I continue this post, I need to mention a few quirks about my personality. I might be slightly competitive. I’m an overachiever. I hate pressure (aka: I was never that person who waited till the last minute to finish something. I can’t…

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NaNoWriMo Update: Week One

It’s officially been one week since I started the NaNoWriMo challenge. I’ve always been very snobby about the idea of writing 50,000 words in a month. Would such an exercise be worth my time? I even began to waffle in the days before November 1st, sure I was about to commit myself to tossing one…

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Scene Cards

For those of you doing NaNo, creating scene cards is going to be a great technique to help you prepare. However, if you’re not doing NaNo, a scene card is still a technique you can use at anytime in your writing process. What’s a scene card? A scene card is a tool to help you…

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Five Quick Tips for NaNoWriMo

As you know I’ve decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year! In preparation, I asked for some tips from fellow VCFA grad (and Dystropian) Shayda Bakhshi. Shayda is a long time veteran (and winner) of NaNoWriMo, and she also gave her graduate lecture on how to succeed at writing waaaaay faster…

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The NaNoWriMo Challenge

I’ve always been one of those people who’s turned up her nose at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The thought of pumping out 50,000 words in one month seems like an exercise in typing, in quantity, in well … producing crap! Sure, Hemingway said that “the first draft of anything is crap,” and Anne Lamott…

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