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"We're the only country on earth stitched together by words and, most important, their dangerous progeny, ideas. And those ideas have had weight. They have had force, not just for us in our eternal dealings, but for the rest of the world." ~ Ken Burns

Friday, November 13, 2009

Day 13

"I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confided to my own identify, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age than my own sensations."

– Mary Shelley



Prompt of the Day: It's alive!

Something or someone is alive that your character didn't think was (a best friend, an arch-villain, a random bird that ran into the window, a piece of supposed road-kill). Or, the opposite: Something or someone is dead that your character had no reason to think would be.



Tip of the Day: Write first, edit later.

As you get further into your NaNo, it becomes tempting to second-guess yourself. You should have explained something sooner, or it doesn't make any sense for your character to go to that coffee shop again if she hated the coffee there in chapter one, or you've decided your protagonist is actually a boy even though you've written her as a girl for 20,000 words.

Make a note about whatever you want to change if that makes you feel better. I use those same marks I talked about for unfinished chapters, --- , so I can search for those when I want to catch my notes-to-self, or you can use something like MS Word's comments feature. But keep writing. Don't go back to fix it yet. You're not done; for all you know you might change your mind again.

For those who are wondering, during my NaNo07, Token of Darkness, the character Brent (also known as Bri) changed gender about a half-dozen times.

Write first. Edit when it's done.

This applies to "little" things, too. You don't like the way that sentence sounds? You can't get that exposition paragraph to be clear enough? Your dialogue went on for sixteen pages when you meant to interrupt it after two? Keep it for now. Strip-mine it for material later.

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