![1-nanowrimo[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/xhptCvp.jpg "1-nanowrimo[1].jpg")
My recommendation for Nanowrimo?
Don't write a fucking novel. That's stupid. Do however use the deadline to force yourself to write 50,000 words. Then you will be 50,000 words closer to writing a decent novel.
So how do you do this?
50,000 /30 days = 1667 a day (I understand we're at day 2 now but fuck it).
For at least 10 days write 10 stories/scenes/summaries/dialogues of 1667 words and do not try to link them at all. Focus on the technical aspect of the writing only.
Now you have 33,000 left and 20 days. Use these to write either 3 short stories about 10,000 words each or 2 short stories of around 16,000 each.
This way you will drastically improve your writing and make use of Nanowrimo month without writing some rushed shitty novel and you will be much closer to being a decent writer. You'll also have a lot of material to critique/analyse after the month of writing is over.
>>7313555
>My recommendation for Nanowrimo?
No one asked.
>>7313573
Source: I'm George R R Martin
I'm already doing this, It's actually a lot of fun just writing everything that comes into your head.
And maybe these notes will be a novel someday, even if not right now.
>>7313555
I'm doing a social experiment inspired by nanowrimo. It as a collaberative novel on the nature of memes.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DYEVQ5ZeAT_kHSfAGX-3JchW-by5UxjDiUzjh538VWU/edit?usp=sharing
>>7313573
This.
You can fuck right off OP.
I'm writing a fantasy novel this month and there's nothing you can do about it.
I'm going to self publish it two months after using a self publishing tool at my library.
You will still be sitting there in your sweaty, food and semen crusted pajamas posting writing advice while people are reading my work.
Bravo OP. Good idea. I don't have time to participate as I work full time and have five paid writing assignments for this month.
>>7313555
>Focus on the technical aspect of the writing only.
Am I the only one who thinks this is the cancer killing contemporary lit?
I used my NaNo last year to write a suite of short stories.
>>7314231
>fantasy novel
>self publishing
>reading my work
Yep, sounds about right.
>>7314271
Yes.
>>7314864
Have fun adding more gimmicks to your "bag of tricks" you learned in workshop
>>7314271
No, it's the Iowa Workshop model styles, exported into and expounded in workshops across America, which exclude concept-heavy literature to focus on conventionalized literature of affect.
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Iowa-Flattened-Literature/144531/
First, I could carve, polish, compress, and simplify; banish myself from my writing as T.S. Eliot advised and strive to enter the gray, crystalline tradition of modernist fiction as it runs from Flaubert through early Joyce and Hemingway to Raymond Carver (alumnus) and Alice Munro. Marilynne Robinson (teacher) did this in her 1980 novel Housekeeping. Denis Johnson (alumnus) played devil to Robinson’s angel in Jesus’ Son. Frank Conroy (director, 1987-2005) had this style down cold—and it is cold. Conroy must have sought it in applications, longing with some kind of spiritual masochism to shiver again and again at the iciness of early Joyce. Such lapidary simplicity becomes psychedelic if you polish it enough. Justin Tussing (class ahead of me) mastered it in his prismatic novel, The Best People in the World. I myself, feeling the influence, revised sentences into pea gravel.
Second, and also much approved, I could work in a warmer vein—the genuinely and winningly loquacious. Ethan Canin (my favorite teacher) set the example here, writing charismatically chatty prose that, like the man himself, exhibited the gross health of the fortunate and tenderhearted. Your influences, if you tended this way, were F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, or anybody else whose sentences unwind with glowing ease. Cheever loomed as an undisputed great. Curtis Sittenfeld, in the class below mine, displayed this style and charm and unassuming grace in Prep and American Wife. Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels, Gilead and Home, turn toward this manner from the adamantine beauty of Housekeeping.
Third, you could write what’s often called "magical realism." Joy Williams (alumna, teacher) and Stuart Dybek (alumnus, teacher) helped to shape a strain of fable-making passed down to my classmates from Kafka and Bruno Schulz and Calvino or their Latin American heirs. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was writing Madeleine Is Sleeping; Sarah Braunstein was developing the sensibility she’d weave into The Sweet Relief of Missing Children; Paul Harding was laying the groundwork for the enchanting weirdness of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers.
These first three categories were the acceptable ones. But Category 4 involved writing things that in the eyes of the workshop appeared weird and unsuccessful—that fell outside the community of norms, that tried too hard. The prevailing term for ambitious pieces that didn’t fit was "postmodernism." The term was a kind of smackdown. Submitting a "postmodern" story was like belching in class.
