I’ve done it. You’re not supposed to come up with a finished product in 30 days (although some people do). Mine was a first draft of roughly 55k words.
I’m reading a short book by Patrick Rothfuss (The Narrow Road Between Desires). This dude is such a notoriously slow writer that it drives me crazy. He had the audacity to do an author’s introduction where he said this was an existing story of his, but he added 15k words to it. I’m like… what is that, a couple weeks? Write faster, you bastard!
And it’s not like this kind of attitude online has in any way made him self-conscious and led to us most likely never getting the conclusion to his series.
I love the idea of Rothfuss planning all day, coming up with the perfect next chapter in his life’s work, knowing just how to wrap up the intricate threads he’s woven. Then he boots up his laptop, slowly stretches and cracks his fingers. Just before he opens up his word processor to record his beautifully crafted prose, he decides to check out Lemmy for a few minutes. Then he comes across a random comment of mine saying how his fans are frustrated at his pace of writing, and just goes:
“I absolutely care about finishing the book… I feel bad about [not giving people what they want] all the time. It’s one of the things that’s fucking me up, I’m in a lot of therapy right now… I went from fiddling around with a book that I just liked to work on and I knew would never be published… then it’s like 'hey a million people are disappointed in you because they want this book. It’s not a great feeling. … If I didn’t care about the book, you’d have it by now… I owe everyone who loved the book something beautiful”
Exactly dude. He’s sold 10,000,000+ books and the pressure is clearly too much for him. And while we can’t unsell those books for him, the best we can do is spread the word far and wide that Patrick Rothfuss writes like old people fuck. If we each do our best to discourage new fans from jumping on the hype train, we just might have a shot at getting the 3rd Kingkiller Chronicles book before we die.
Just finished his 4 secret project books. Also just finished the first Mistborn trilogy with my son and started in on the Wax and Wayne series with him (I’ve already read them). I freaking love me some Brandon Sanderson.
Nice. Yeah his prose is meh, but the world building, character writing, and volume are amazing. I’m in the middle of stormlight right now and loving it.
Stormlight is my absolute favorite series. Yeah, Sanderson doesn’t write as flowery as some authors, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I love how he puts together a whole world with a new magic system, history, religions, political climate, etc. Then is like, alright so that’s what the world was like hundreds of years ago, now let’s see what happens when they get guns and spaceships!
He also does a friendly competition thing with his fans in his subreddit every year in November. He posts how many words he writes in a week and encourages others to post their word-count to see if anyone can keep up with his output.
whats with the book writing thing? First I’m hearing about it.
New Novel November
(November is National Novel Writing month in which you’re encouraged to write a 50k+ word novel)
I would like to know who in the fuck thinks they can write a novel in only a month.
If college taught me anything, it’s that I can write thousands of words per night. Typically fastest in the wee hours of the morning.
None of these words are good, mind you, but they are in fact words.
Oh yeah. Some of my worst work is on those mega-inspired days where I sit for 10h and crank out 10000 words.
To this day I don’t know why I do that if I end up throwing most of it away.
Maybe it’s good to get bad plot out of the system.
November is National Novel Writing month and December is National Edit the Terrible Novel You Just Wrote month.
Haha, more like the entire next year.
For me, a good day is about 1000 words. I really run out of juice after that and just type bland shit. That’s about 3 months for a decent draft.
Oh it depends massively for me. One of my best (IMHO) short stories is 8k and was written over 10-12h in a day.
But that has to be a pretty special day.
On bad days I usually go into the negatives 😂
If you can make time for 1,700 words a day starting on the 1st then by the end of the month you’ve exceeded 50k
Making time and having energy for 1,700 words a day on top of daily life activities and working a job is the trick.
1700 words shouldn’t take that long. Are you allowed to write on the computer?
Of course. The trick is that you have to come up with which words to use in what order yourself.
Well the challenge is about word count, not about making a coherent novel.
I’m gonna cheese this challenge so hard.
If you want to go through a lot of trouble to make something long that doesn’t make sense, Dadaist theater is easier and more fun… 🤷
I want to win that achievement
Hmmm, but are we speedrunning to 50k or are we going for the word record in the amount of time given?
As obviously we would need different cheesing strategies
I assume so, I don’t see why not
That’s gonna be piss easy!
I’ve done it. You’re not supposed to come up with a finished product in 30 days (although some people do). Mine was a first draft of roughly 55k words.
I’m reading a short book by Patrick Rothfuss (The Narrow Road Between Desires). This dude is such a notoriously slow writer that it drives me crazy. He had the audacity to do an author’s introduction where he said this was an existing story of his, but he added 15k words to it. I’m like… what is that, a couple weeks? Write faster, you bastard!
And it’s not like this kind of attitude online has in any way made him self-conscious and led to us most likely never getting the conclusion to his series.
I love the idea of Rothfuss planning all day, coming up with the perfect next chapter in his life’s work, knowing just how to wrap up the intricate threads he’s woven. Then he boots up his laptop, slowly stretches and cracks his fingers. Just before he opens up his word processor to record his beautifully crafted prose, he decides to check out Lemmy for a few minutes. Then he comes across a random comment of mine saying how his fans are frustrated at his pace of writing, and just goes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/KingkillerChronicle/comments/k52gcz/pat_on_how_much_he_cares_about_finishing_book_3/
Literally, the pressure makes it harder for him to make the book he thinks the fans deserve.
Exactly dude. He’s sold 10,000,000+ books and the pressure is clearly too much for him. And while we can’t unsell those books for him, the best we can do is spread the word far and wide that Patrick Rothfuss writes like old people fuck. If we each do our best to discourage new fans from jumping on the hype train, we just might have a shot at getting the 3rd Kingkiller Chronicles book before we die.
Nobody said it had to be a good novel.
Brandon Sanderson
Just finished his 4 secret project books. Also just finished the first Mistborn trilogy with my son and started in on the Wax and Wayne series with him (I’ve already read them). I freaking love me some Brandon Sanderson.
Nice. Yeah his prose is meh, but the world building, character writing, and volume are amazing. I’m in the middle of stormlight right now and loving it.
Stormlight is my absolute favorite series. Yeah, Sanderson doesn’t write as flowery as some authors, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I love how he puts together a whole world with a new magic system, history, religions, political climate, etc. Then is like, alright so that’s what the world was like hundreds of years ago, now let’s see what happens when they get guns and spaceships!
Branden Sanderson
He also does a friendly competition thing with his fans in his subreddit every year in November. He posts how many words he writes in a week and encourages others to post their word-count to see if anyone can keep up with his output.
Dudes a machine
as someone who had to do this stuff as a haze in college its doable but its hell without amphetamines
Isaac Asimov. The guy was a fucking robot.
Yeah, well, when you develop characters as much as he did, it’s manageable, I guess.
He did some good world building, though - don’t get me wrong, I feasted on the Hari/robot series several times over!
Then there was L. Ron Hubbard. Nobody spewed words like L Ron. Nobody wrote pulp like L Ron. Motherfucker could churn out a book in a day
I bet it was Stephen King’s idea.
Fuck that.
In which nation?
!nanowrimo@literature.cafe
(Sadly not very active of a community yet)
That acronym sounds familiar, but I haven’t heard it in years. Totally forgot it existed.
API error trying to access that community
If your instance hasn’t “seen” it yet, you might need to find it in the search tool for it to show up.
its called NaNoWriMo
Nah, not writing month
I’m so dam good at that challenge.