Daedalus

I was watching the film The Flight of the Phoenix earlier today, and this ‘arc’ kept occuring to me, so for the sake of curiosity I decided to have a look to see if it fit this structure, and if so, how. It’s a bit of an interesting case as it’s an ensemble piece with multiple ‘main’ characters, each with their own arc. I’ll consider it for the…[Read more]

Yeah, I tend to consider matters of formal structure far more in the edit than in the initial draft

Lots of interesting stuff here. I’ve never been much of a planner, and am inherently sceptical of the idea of story structure as something fixed and immutable for many of the reasons Libby raises. As structures go, however, I like this one more than most as it’s fixed to the inner life of the main character rather than something that risks being…[Read more]

Most of them are good, but I particularly like ‘Two Cities and the Void’ and ‘London and her Shadow’

I like Raine’s suggestion of December. It would allow those doing NaNo to keep up a bit of momentum while not having to keep to such a ferocious pace, and is soon enough that folk not doing NaNo have something to look forward to. And it could be a good way of getting Room With A View entries done

I’d be up for SloMoWriMo

A Story of No Importance
Or, Lady Wokingham’s Ban
Or, Baloné: A Tragedy in One Act

Was meeting the in-laws ever straightforward? Alton reflected on the frosty atmosphere as he pushed his food around his plate. Gwen gave him a smile when her mother’s attention was otherwise engaged but he could tell she felt as awkward as him. Every topic of conv…[Read more]

Great story Elle, well done. I agree with Philippa about that line!

I completely understand, and I tend to have the same issue. For me, the fact that NaNo is only a month means I can feel a bit more comfortable turning down the quality filter. I do like to construct first drafts carefully (I don’t really know any other way) but that’s far from the main reason I don’t write much. For me, the main challenge is in…[Read more]

@raine – you just post your word counts for each day, but towards the end of the month you can ‘validate’, which is to say, you paste all your written words into NaNo’s special word counting window, and it counts it and confirms your totals. This is so you can prove you’ve written what you say you’ve written, and also makes sure everyone is…[Read more]

NaNo generally works for me because I am patchy about my output the rest of the time, and my biggest challenge is just getting enough words down on paper to work on. That said, I can totally understand why it doesn’t work for some people, and in fairness there have been years when it worked brilliantly for me and other years when I churned out…[Read more]

If you take notes during the interview Squidge you can totally count that towards your totals 😉

It’s not ideal to miss the first day, but NaNo gives you a running daily target based on what you’ve already done. It’s quite addictive chasing the targets, I find

Haha, recrossed with you Squidge. Yeah, why not? Let’s buddy up

@squidge They’re a lot more relaxed these days about what qualifies – it’s pretty much 50k words of anything. I just find the discipline it gives useful over the course of a month

I might do it but cheat and use it to finish the draft of my WIP plus a novella and some shorts