NaNo Quickie: Pizza and Re-Write
Today, I am facing two challenges: first - I am completely out of dishes. No way to fix lunch without a major time investment in the kitchen to clean up. So I am taking a leaf out of Jarsto’s book and ordered pizza. [An hour later] I am so full all I want to do is lay down and have a nap. The pizza was delicious. And I didn’t need any dishes *g*
Okay, the second challenge is more tricky. I checked and the three chapters I wrote on Monday are completely unusable. They don’t fit in with the current story line anymore and I plan to discard them. That in turn means, I need to make up for these 7,149 words which I will lose. So, today’s challenge will be to write that many words, just to keep my current word count.
In addition, I need to do a tiny re-write. I know, we are not supposed to let our inner editor out during November, but if I don’t do the re-write, the rest of the story won’t work. But I am not sure yet how to best do that.
To figure out how to progress from here, I will resort to cheating my brain into creativity and talk a walk. Since it’s raining outside and showering also counts as a method for stimulating my brain, I should be doubly productive during my walk.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
I’d think long and hard about deleting those monday chapters if I were you. Even if they don’t fit the story there are better ways of dealing with them. I believe Chris Baty recommends putting them in Italics and leaving them in, so they do boost your count.
My own approach shies away from Italics (I’m using that for short interludes which are just one characters train of thought every time) but to use strike-through instead. Fortunately I haven’t had to do that this year yet, but when it’s a matter of thousands of words I wouldn’t feel too bad about doing it “the Baty way”.
As for letting out the inner editor, I have to admit I’ve done a bit of that anyway, largely to mess around with my MC’s names. He has three of them: his real one, his cover, and his cover’s cover (ah, the joys of espionage) I had the first cover and the real one matching, but that didn’t work, so now his cover’s cover matches the real first name, which is good because that’s the name most people know.
It was probably more poignant to have a dissonance between his self identification and what people called him, but it was bloody impossible to write that way, so I went in with search and replace on day one or two and changed things around. Technically and edit, but the words came a lot easier once I’d done that.
[Reply]
Starstuff Reply:
November 19th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
You just made my mind go all funny with that explanation of your character’s names
I guess that’s tactics, confusing me to keep me from writing. Not that there’s anything to worry about, because today was just not a writing day, especially since a friend called a while ago and we went and had dinner together. Now I am back at the desk, but I am just thinking about where to go from here, the walk didn’t help all that much.
I first did it the “Baty way”
Putting the chapters in italics. But I use italics already for written messages characters exchange, so I just marked the chapters as “Concept” rather than “First Draft” and now they are showing up in a different color. And what little I had to change within the last chapter I just wrote, what didn’t fit got the ‘Annotation’ tag and is not a pale shade of red, only when you put the cursor inside the text it becomes a deep red. Bless Scrivener, I love the app.
[Reply]
Leave your response!