Finding the time…
| Lennac |
Finding the time…
|
    0 / 50,000 Official Participant
Joined: Aug 5, 2010
Posts: 3
Posted on:
Oct 8, 2010 – 11 03 |
This may sound like a bad question, but for a History/English major in University, this has been the reason I have failed and shied away from NaNoWriMo before cause I don’t really have the time. Any hints or tips on how to find the time for this one while juggling essays and extensive readings? I really want to give this a try this year (wasn’t really thinking about the timing of it since it’s in November), but I’m not just going to back down now.
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there’s a lot of tips and advice on this subject here: http://www.squidoo.com/The13StepMethod Part of what I wrote there, I’ll copy here, because it directly answers your question:
The Secret to Reaching Word Count Goals Without Using Word Padding:
I don’t *pad*, never have, never will, no reason too. I just write and write, the words always come.
Here’s what I try to do… I don’t always stick to this schedule, but of the schedules I’ve tried, this is the easiest on for me. Here it goes:
First off:
I do not write the book straight through beginning to end.
I do not write in chapters.
I do not write to a set “hours per day”
I do not write to a set “words per day”
What I do is, I write small segments or scenes from my book. Say a conversation between two characters. Or maybe the description of a room. Something like that. I find this easier, because I can see a very clear beginning, middle, and end. Not the beginning, middle, and end of the entire book. Not the beginning, middle and end of the entire chapter. Just the beginning, middle, and end of that one scene, which in most cases is 2 to 4 paragraphs long or about 600 – 800 words.
I make it my goal to write three of these segments each day. One in the morning as soon as I wake up, before I even get out of bed. One in the afternoon, when I get back in from taking my dog out for his daily walk. One in the evening, last thing just before going to bed. It takes about 15 – 30 minutes for me to write each segment. Or about 40 minutes to an hour and a half each day. In the end I end up with about 2,750 words written at the end of the day.
It is through doing these 15 minute blocks through out the day, that is the secret to how I have written 200K for NaNoWriMo 4 years in a row, in spite of a busy life, family, work, and school schedule.
In other words, I do not find the time, I make the time. Each of us has 24 hours in a day. It is up to us how we spend our time allotted to us.
Think about it this way, what are you doing right now and do you REALLY need to be doing it or could you spend this time writing instead?
Let’s take TV shows for example: Do you really NEED to watch CSI tonight? Think about it – for every one hour TV show you watch, you lose one hour of writing. It only takes 15 minutes to write 500 words. There are 4 blocks of 15 minutes per hour. By watching a one hour TV show you just lost 2,000 words. If you watch a one hour show 5 days a week, for 4 weeks, that’s 20 hours of writing time you literally threw away, that’s 40,000 words you tossed in the trash bin because you wasted your valuable time staring at a TV screen when you could have been writing!
Think about: by removing one, one hour long TV program from your daily habits, you gain an extra 40,000 words for your novel. If you can gain that much just by removing one TV show from your life, how much more writing time will you gain by removing other unnecessary time wasters in your life?
Anyways, When you take it and break it down into tiny chunks like this, it seems like you haven’t written very much at all, when in fact you have gone well above and beyond your word count goal and have no need to worry about padding at all, plus by taking it in small chunks, and skipping all over your story instead of going straight through it, you don’t suffer from story burn out either. I hope this helps. Good luck with your story!
~~EK
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Need help with NaNoWriMo?
Check out these:
The 13 Step Method
The Top 5 NaNoWriMo Tools
Creating Character Profiles
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