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Monday, November 8, 2010

We Answer Your NaNo Questions!

Writing Song of the Day: "21 Questions" by 50 Cent ftg. Nate Dogg
Contest Reminder: Don't forget to enter our NaNoWriMo Titling contest! Give us title ideas, and we'll give you gift cards and books. Contest ends this Wednesday at midnight, EST.

So, Quita and I (as well as thousands and thousands of our writer friends) have signed up for NaNoWriMo this month. And we're doing surprisingly well, actually. As I type this, we're both around 17,000 words or so--which is little higher than where we should be. The end is actually looking possible now!

But we've come across a few roadblocks. And if you're participating, we sure some of you have as well. So we're here to answer all of your deepest, darkest NaNo questions and hopefully provide you with some inspiration.

How do you meet your daily writing quotas?
One word--liquor. Okay, and maybe chocolate. Oh, and a little bit of whining. But ultimately...liquor.

How do you shut off your internal editor?
See first response to question above. Seriously, get one or two grape wine coolers in me and I'm not going to care if I switched from present to past tense.

What do you when you start hating your story?
Do something really crappy to your characters. Not only will that provide much needed conflict, but it'll also teach them for making your dialogue sound corny and unrealistic.

Dancing with the Stars comes on tonight. How am I supposed to get my writing done?
Are you kidding me? The Situation got kicked off weeks ago. Now we're stuck with Bristol Palin and some Kurt-guy that may or may not have played professional football. Pull out your laptop--you'll thank me later.

I've outlined my first few chapters and now I'm stuck. Now what?
See first response to the first question.

I've pretty much covered two of the major conflicts: man vs. self and man vs. man. How am I supposed to tackle man vs. nature when my story involves two men's quest for self-fulfillment?
*Blinks*

NaNo's been getting a lot of flack this year. How do I fend off the haters?
You don't. You write 50,000 words of a novel while the "haters" write anti-NaNo blog posts. Maybe they'll have fun revising those in the future.

So, did I leave anything out? Do you have any burning NaNo questions? Also, how are you all doing with your NaNo projects? And if you're not doing NaNo this year, how are you tackling your daily writing goals. We'd love to know! :)

5 comments:

Abby Stevens said...

You write 50,000 words of a novel while the "haters" write anti-NaNo blog posts. Maybe they'll have fun revising those in the future.

Ha. This is such an awesome response! NaNo is totally not for me, but if it helps others, I don't see why people get so up in arms about it...

Holly Hill said...

lol This is great.

Ricki Schultz said...

Hee - great advice, ladies! Keep on truckin'!

Racquel Henry said...

Hmmm. Haven't tried alcohol, but I should have known better! I might just try that tonight! And I remember those Grape wine coolers...sure got us through new student reading LMAO! And, this is precisely what I was going to email you guys about! I'm stuck! I have ideas (which will be in the email) but I'm not sure if there's too much going on. I don't want it to be like a certain somebody's (the person with the million plot lines that shall remain nameless!) ;)

Alicia Gregoire said...

Love this. My solution to word count is caffeine.