Young Writers Society

When I embark on those crazy projects, I have a bit of a formula to stick to. I kind of "build the body" of the story.

What I would do first is just rush through it, write the bones of each project. Don't worry about word count, just get the basics down. And yes, this does seem like a story outline, but you're really just writing the events in chronological order.

Then, put the muscles on by doing fillers, adding details, filling in holes with character development, et cetera.

Then put it away for a week or two before put the skin on! Make it flawless by editing, stripping, adding, tweaking, et cetera. Give it to two valued buddies and tell them to look at it extremely closely. Then take their advice and do those corrections IF you believe they will work.

That should keep you busy for the summer.

o.0 How do you know exactly how long your novel is going to be? I don't get it, what if you finish 2000 words short but your happy with what you have? Or you finish with an extra 2000 words and your also happy? I must sound like a nut, but how do you know exactly how many words you want in your story if you aren't finished yet?

@jasminebells: Estimating finished word counts is a bit of a touch and go thing. When you come up with the idea, the "estimate" (for me, anyway) is more like how long I hope it'll be rather than how long it will actually be. Usually, as I flesh the story out a bit more, I start to get a better idea of how many words it'll be by estimating how long the average scene will be. Once I actually write a few scenes and estimate how many scenes I'll need, the word count estimate gets more precise. The more you write, the easier it gets to figure out how long it'll be. I must say, though, that it's near impossible to do if you've never written anything of length (about 30,000+ or so). I did my first NaNo last year and finished with 75k, and my estimating became a lot closer to how long the actual work ended up being. Really, it's a bit hard to explain, but mostly it's a lot of guessing and comparing to previous works.
The way I think of it is, if the story ends up shorter or longer than I thought it would, then as long as I told the story as best I could, I'm happy. If I didn't, I go back and fix the problem to where I'm happy. If I have a goal that I fall short of, I just write a quick short-story (usually just a fanfiction one-shot [I just find those easy to write]) until I meet it. I can't speak for anyone else, but that's how it works for me. Sorry if this was a bit long, but I hoped I answered your question. ^^

@MadameX: I seriously applaud you for taking this on. Four thousand words a day is something I only wish I could do. Good luck!

That sounds crazy. I can never estimate how long my novels or scenes will be, because most of the time they change half way through. Sometimes my characters suddenly do things I didn't plan them to do and therefore drive the story in a different direction. I love it when that happens.

This could be fairly easy, depending on how motivated you are, and how fast you type. I'm not exactly the fastest typer, but during NaNo, I've found that I can fairly easily get 3k an hour. It all depends. Just make sure that you use projects that you really want to write, or you could burn out. Regardless, it sounds fun. Maybe you should make a usergroup? I'd do one for 100k, at least. I'm not sure I could do better. Although I usually do duuring NaNo, but I've got exams coming up. So... something. xD PM me sometime. ^_^

TheEvilWithin wrote:That sounds crazy. I can never estimate how long my novels or scenes will be, because most of the time they change half way through. Sometimes my characters suddenly do things I didn't plan them to do and therefore drive the story in a different direction. I love it when that happens.

Haha yeah. I love it when things change, too, but I'm also a little OCD about it. (^_^) I like to know how long what I'm writing is going to be, even if the number changes constantly. A bad habit I developed during NaNo, I guess.

tigress5674 wrote:Haha yeah. I love it when things change, too, but I'm also a little OCD about it. (^_^) I like to know how long what I'm writing is going to be, even if the number changes constantly. A bad habit I developed during NaNo, I guess.

NaNo! That competition is just plain wrong. A story should be told (or shown, rather), and once it's finished, that's how long it is. Competitions like NaNo make writers push too hard, and that's not what writing is about. It's unbelievable how easily the writer's condition when writing can alter the piece's tone and pace. I say there's no need to rush. Yes, it would be lovely to complete a novel in just one month, but the quality of such novels are usually poor and leave the writer too much editing to do. Let your writing come out naturally, and allow your story to be the size it needs to be.

Michael Moorcock wrote each of his Hawkmoon series books in three days. Stephen King wrote 'Rage' in ten. George Simenon wrote more then 12 novels a year. All three authors are known for top notch quality.
Dean Koontz published eight novels a year as a young man.
James Hadley Chase wrote his first (breakthrough) novel in six weeks.
Mickey Spillane wrote his first (breakthrough) novel in two weeks and a half.

So writing something superfast and making it into a classic is not impossible. Just very very very very very very hard!
Of course really thick books should take between half a year and a decade to complete to be really excellent, but shorter 'adventures' or 'penny dreadfuls' can and are being written quickly, and as the above examples show they can be in fact excellent, so forward to the summer writing frenzy!

Also, the point of NaNo isn't to finish with a perfect piece, its to finish with a decent-length (honestly, 50,000 words isn't even a publishable length nowadays) manuscript that will be refined, changed, and edited in the coming weeks.

Don't do iiit!

Just to be a party pooper, and throw in a serious note for anyone who will actually try something like this.

I did 200k for nano, which was about 6000 words a day, and had to detox afterwards. Writing that much is fun, but doing it every day for a prolonged period of time has a way of distorting your sense of reality.

No kidding either. Imagine writing 1000 words an hour. That's four hours of each day you will spend totally enveloped by a completely fictional environment. Not to mention the physical strain and potential social withdrawal. Three months is far too long to keep up such a habit, and a waste of a perfectly good summer.

MadameX wrote:honestly, 50,000 words isn't even a publishable length nowadays.

Almost totally true, unfortunately. Gone are the days of tight thrillers and fantasy adventures. Now the bolaters control the market on all levels: as writers, editors, publishers and readers. But still, even in our era, here and there you can find some short stuff. Here's an example:

An average R.L. Stine books is about 20 000 - 25 000
Ann Martin's books are around 25 000
Terry Goodkind, Debt of Bones - 30 000
Neil Gaiman, Coraline - 31 000
Waller's The Bridges of Madison County is around 38 000
Michael Crichton, Binary - 43 000
Paolo Coelho, the Alchemist - 39 500
Dahl, Matilda - 40 800
Stephen King, Rage - 50 900
Clive Barker, The Thief of Always - 37 600
Janet Evanovich, Smitten - 51 800
James Patterson - 3rd degree, - 62 900
Eoin Colfer, The Arctic Incident - 62 600

So, if it's for kids, young adults, emotional adults or thriller junkies, one can still, with luck and determination, succeed in flogging something which is not a 100 000K brick, not even a 70 000K mid-level brick. But the chances are probably like half a million to one

My mom's friend gave herself 2 weeks to write a book. She wrote the novel in 1 week and 6 days. It got published by some small no one heard of company. It wasn't very good. I don't doubt that your novel will be done by the end of summer since you gave yourself a deadline. However, I do doubt that you won't go crazy with checking it over and over and revising it till it's basically nothing like the original manuscript.

I'm giving myself till the beginning October to write a book called Thief for this college scholarship contest thing due December. I don't plan on it being very long so I'm sure I'll be done with it. I'm giving myself only until October because those three months will be spent revising like crazy. Just remember quality is better than quantity. 10000000000000000000000000000000 words mean nothing if they aren't good. The only thing the reader will be left with is not how great a writer you are but what a waste of time that read was. ;D

TheEvilWithin wrote:

tigress5674 wrote:Haha yeah. I love it when things change, too, but I'm also a little OCD about it. (^_^) I like to know how long what I'm writing is going to be, even if the number changes constantly. A bad habit I developed during NaNo, I guess.

NaNo! That competition is just plain wrong. A story should be told (or shown, rather), and once it's finished, that's how long it is. Competitions like NaNo make writers push too hard, and that's not what writing is about. It's unbelievable how easily the writer's condition when writing can alter the piece's tone and pace. I say there's no need to rush. Yes, it would be lovely to complete a novel in just one month, but the quality of such novels are usually poor and leave the writer too much editing to do. Let your writing come out naturally, and allow your story to be the size it needs to be.

Normally, I'd agree with that (well, the part about allowing the story to be the size it needs to be), but I actually think NaNo is a lot of fun. Also, it's not like there's a penalty for overshooting 50k, and I know that a lot of people who get about 40k or so and finish it end up writing short stories or backstories - stuff that wouldn't be in the book but is still just fun to write. In addition, people always have the option to ditch/restart their NaNo project rather than spend of a heck of a long time revising it. NaNo can actually be helpful in that it motivates writers to push past that part in the middle of a book where it just seems almost ridiculous to continue (usually due to doubts starting to set in about reader appeal, or other some other such reason). Mostly though, it's just a really fun way to spend November, and I think that's why people do it. It's certainly why I do it.

Well, its not like all of my manuscripts are going to be exactly 72,000 words. One might be 80,000 while another is 62,000, but my biggest problem in writing is trying to edit while I write and never finishing. I know the manuscripts I end up with aren't going to be "finished" projects, just something to use while I get it exactly how I want it. I can't edit something if I never write it.