Speed Writing (Eleventh hour help for all you NaNo people)

A few weeks ago, I tried something new, and it really sped up my drafting. 

After reading about how--doing basically the same thing--Ava Jae over at Writability Won NaNoWriMo In 9 Days, I thought I'd post this for my writer friends who are struggling to make their word count.


I typically write very clean, meaning I'm a picky polisher in my initial draft. It's closer to publish-ready than most, but it takes me forever.

Besides research, the main thing that slows me down is coming up with fresh ways to describe emotion, movement, facial expression, etc.  I decided to try something different if I found myself really stuck. (You know....when you sit there for twenty minutes, debating about a single phrase or word, and draw nothing but an icky cliche or a total mental blank. :P)  

I started putting a note-to-self (e.g. Show Harrison's outrage.) or a cliched/bad version of what I was aiming for in brackets, and then letting go and moving on. I've left blanks and notes in my WIPs before, but never to this extent. 

You know what? It worked! 

It helped me keep the momentum of the scene, which was good, especially since dialogue and flow of events come pretty easily to me. Now, when I go back to polish, I can open up my emotion thesaurus and other writing helpers and fix all that stuff at once. I think, in the long run, it will save time.

Don't give up. There are still 12 days left. 

You can do it! 

Go forth and NaNo!!! :D 


To tweet about this post, click here.