Rule #1: Be a Genius
Tue, 01/05/2010 - 12:47pm
Cat Valente re-posted a great article on her blog about writing a novel in thirty days. I'm not sure if any of you may have seen it in its original posting, but I thought it was great and certainly worth sharing.
Basically, NaNo says you can write crap in thirty days. Ms. Valente says you can write pure light in thirty days. Take a look:
Tue, 01/05/2010 - 6:19pm
#2
Well, in all fairness, what NaNo says is that it doesn't *matter* if what you write in that thirty days is crap, so long as you write. Not that anything written in thirty days is automagically craptastic.
Disclosure: I don't work for ... whoever does NaNo, and I've only finished once. X3
Holy shit, this is totally true.
I write something like 40-50K words per month on my weblits and have been doing that since last March, with three breaks. And it is TOTALLY true. If you just go, you forget the insecurity stuff. You get practice in forgetting it. And the midnight-everyday deadline makes me go. You live on the edge of burnout, and sometimes go over it, but your writing quality does not suffer, at least it hasn't seemed to for me, based both on my reading it back and reader reaction. All that practice makes it better.
I hadn't seen this put into words before. Thanks, Seth, for the link.
I used to think my writing was horribly perverse, and now I worry that it's not perverse enough for the Internet.
www.chevenga.com