If you can make time for 1,700 words a day starting on the 1st then by the end of the month you’ve exceeded 50k
Making time and having energy for 1,700 words a day on top of daily life activities and working a job is the trick.
Comment on Glad it's almost over
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 11 months agoI would like to know who in the fuck thinks they can write a novel in only a month.
toomanypancakes@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 11 months ago
1700 words shouldn’t take that long. Are you allowed to write on the computer?
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Of course. The trick is that you have to come up with which words to use in what order yourself.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Well the challenge is about word count, not about making a coherent novel.
I’m gonna cheese this challenge so hard.
toomanypancakes@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I assume so, I don’t see why not
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 11 months ago
That’s gonna be piss easy!
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 11 months ago
Nobody said it had to be a good novel.
ickplant@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’ve done it. You’re not supposed to come up with a finished product in 30 days (although some people do). Mine was a first draft of roughly 55k words.
jballs@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I’m reading a short book by Patrick Rothfuss (The Narrow Road Between Desires). This dude is such a notoriously slow writer that it drives me crazy. He had the audacity to do an author’s introduction where he said this was an existing story of his, but he added 15k words to it. I’m like… what is that, a couple weeks? Write faster, you bastard!
TheActualDevil@lemmy.world 11 months ago
And it’s not like this kind of attitude online has in any way made him self-conscious and led to us most likely never getting the conclusion to his series.
jballs@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I love the idea of Rothfuss planning all day, coming up with the perfect next chapter in his life’s work, knowing just how to wrap up the intricate threads he’s woven. Then he boots up his laptop, slowly stretches and cracks his fingers. Just before he opens up his word processor to record his beautifully crafted prose, he decides to check out Lemmy for a few minutes. Then he comes across a random comment of mine saying how his fans are frustrated at his pace of writing, and just goes:
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Brandon Sanderson
Patches@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Branderson
jballs@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Just finished his 4 secret project books. Also just finished the first Mistborn trilogy with my son and started in on the Wax and Wayne series with him (I’ve already read them). I freaking love me some Brandon Sanderson.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Nice. Yeah his prose is meh, but the world building, character writing, and volume are amazing. I’m in the middle of stormlight right now and loving it.
jballs@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Stormlight is my absolute favorite series. Yeah, Sanderson doesn’t write as flowery as some authors, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I love how he puts together a whole world with a new magic system, history, religions, political climate, etc. Then is like, alright so that’s what the world was like hundreds of years ago, now let’s see what happens when they get guns and spaceships!
Vaginal_blood_fart@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Branden Sanderson
TheActualDevil@lemmy.world 11 months ago
He also does a friendly competition thing with his fans in his subreddit every year in November. He posts how many words he writes in a week and encourages others to post their word-count to see if anyone can keep up with his output.
Vaginal_blood_fart@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Dudes a machine
akincisor@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Isaac Asimov. The guy was a fucking robot.
flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Yeah, well, when you develop characters as much as he did, it’s manageable, I guess.
He did some good world building, though - don’t get me wrong, I feasted on the Hari/robot series several times over!
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Then there was L. Ron Hubbard. Nobody spewed words like L Ron. Nobody wrote pulp like L Ron. Motherfucker could churn out a book in a day
MaxVoltage@lemmy.world 11 months ago
as someone who had to do this stuff as a haze in college its doable but its hell without amphetamines
LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I bet it was Stephen King’s idea.
Patches@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
If college taught me anything, it’s that I can write thousands of words per night. Typically fastest in the wee hours of the morning.
None of these words are good, mind you, but they are in fact words.
Sheltac@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Oh yeah. Some of my worst work is on those mega-inspired days where I sit for 10h and crank out 10000 words.
To this day I don’t know why I do that if I end up throwing most of it away.
Maybe it’s good to get bad plot out of the system.
rwhitisissle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
November is National Novel Writing month and December is National Edit the Terrible Novel You Just Wrote month.
Sheltac@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Haha, more like the entire next year.
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
For me, a good day is about 1000 words. I really run out of juice after that and just type bland shit. That’s about 3 months for a decent draft.
Sheltac@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Oh it depends massively for me. One of my best (IMHO) short stories is 8k and was written over 10-12h in a day.
But that has to be a pretty special day.
On bad days I usually go into the negatives 😂