Speed - Tag - In a past life… https://archive.jtimothyking.com/tags/speed/ Speed - Tag - In a past life… Hugo -- gohugo.ioen-usFri, 23 Oct 2009 22:22:15 +0000 10 NaNoWriMo Tips https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2009/10/23/10-nanowrimo-tips/ Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:22:15 +0000 J. Timothy King https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2009/10/23/10-nanowrimo-tips/ National Novel Writing Month rolls around every November. And I usually don’t participate, although I may this year. (I threatened to last year, but those plans fell through.) My beef is that a writer should be writing all year round, not just during the month of November. In general, I see little to be gained by cramming a lot of word-generation into 30 days, when it takes so much more to create a viable novel.

On the other hand, NaNoWriMo is a fun event for many people. And it spurs some to become writers, rather than just talking about maybe writing someday. And it does increase the efficiency, and even the efficacy, of some writers. Because NaNoWriMo imposes a deadline, as well as social pressure to meet the deadline. Both of these can be very effective.

The thing you have to remember is that NaNoWriMo is a sprint, as opposed to a marathon. It’s a lot of energy, a lot of speed, dumping a lot of words, fast, for a short period of time. And it doesn’t encompass the whole novel-writing process, either. There’s a significant amount of planning you should do, which you ideally should be almost finished with by now. And afterward, there’s at least one editing pass, maybe two (story revision and line editing).

So in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, here are a number of tips for completing NaNoWriMo, taken from my own experience as a writer and culled from other writers around the Internet:

]]> I Wanna Write like Nora Roberts: 7 Tips for Prolific Writers https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2009/10/19/i-wanna-write-like-nora-roberts-7-tips-for-prolific-writers/ Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:00:00 +0000 J. Timothy King https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2009/10/19/i-wanna-write-like-nora-roberts-7-tips-for-prolific-writers/
© 2008 Ed Yourdon CC BY-SA 2.0 (source)

As you may know, I’ve never been able to get through a Nora Roberts novel. I’ve always gotten bored or otherwise lost interest. So then why would I say that I want to write like her?

It’s not a joke. I seriously admire Nora Roberts as an author, even though her fiction is not for me. Here’s why.

Look at Nora Roberts’s history as a writer, even from the very beginning. She got started in 1979, when she first put pencil to paper, literally, to write a novel:

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