Scribblings

It’s easy. Start out by writing a 10,600 word story. Then edit yourself without mercy.

Seriously, I participated in thie NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) “spring training”. Here’s the deal. In November, all sorts of writers join up and commit to write a 50,000 word novel (which is a novella, really). Over at the Relief Writer’s Network, some folks were doing a little practice, and decided to write a 10,000 word story in a week. I thought it would be interesting and fun, and good self-discipline.

Well, I spent the first half of the week writing down ideas I had for a novel (silly me). About Thursday, I realized I hated the idea of not completing something I signed up for. So I cranked out 10,000 words in three days (which was quite satisfying). This week was provided for editing. After printing my story and being ruthless and unforgiving, I cut 10,600 words down to 7,100 (I’ve got a final pass still to go). It was liberating, amazing, and a huge step forward in my writing.

So that’s it. To get a good story, write something about 120% longer, and then edit like you should anyway. I’m sure that others don’t need that process, but it helped me tremendously.

Once the story’s done, I’ll be sure to post it here somewhere.

-Brett

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 7:36 am and is filed under Self-Editing, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.