Stats:
Average Daily Wordcount: 3,304
Week Total Wordcount: 23,130
Words to go:
Month: 16,000
Year: 932,666
Another week bites the dust!
I was sick this week which means that I both had more time to write because I was off work, and less time to write because of all the sleeping. As you can see by my stats, I basically stayed on par with the previous two weeks. I can’t be mad at that, but there’s always a little part of me that’s like…you had all that time! Why were you sleeping?
Dumb, I know. When you need rest, you need rest. That’s something I forget sometimes and I’m definitely going to have to keep reminding myself of it as this challenge continues on.
What I learned this week is that outlines help. They really, really do. I wrote my second novella for this challenge with even less of an outline than I had for the first and let me tell you, it’s a mess. There’s a good chance that this will be a complete rewrite when I get around to revising it. At the very least I’m going to have some major work to do on the theme because it took me literally over 20k of a 27k novella to figure out what my main character was supposed to be learning from his experience. The latter half, um, wanders.
Anyway, another interesting thing I learned about outlines is that I don’t actually need one in order to finish a draft. I have tried various forms of outlining (including not outlining) before and have always come to the conclusion that I need at least a little bit of an outline in order to actually finish a story.
Not so.
Granted, like I said, it’s a pretty big mess and possibly a total rewrite, but then many of my extensively outlined stories have turned out the same way. So, I guess I’m still a little torn on the plotter vs. pantser front.
If you read my post on Saturday, you already know that I’m going to be doing Structure Saturdays, where I try out different outlining methods so I can see what works for me. From now until NaNoWriMo, I’m going to be trying out The Snowflake Method, so if you’re interested please join me on Saturdays to talk about my progress (and yours if you decide to outline along with me!).
Other than that, I think I’ve learned that posture really can help with typing pain and that YouTube is a procrastination machine. But then I kind of already knew those things, I just didn’t want to admit it.
Have you learned anything new this week? Are you a plotter or a pantser or something in between?
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-Robin
Rambling Robin 