by Hillary DePiano | Oct 27, 2008 | Announcements, Living the Writing Life, On Writing: Craft and Commiseration
#8 Skip around. If the part that you are writing is really hard or really boring, skip it! You have my permission to jump ahead to that cool fight scene that you are dying to write. Getting the book done is the point and writing it in order is not necessarily the way...
by Hillary DePiano | Oct 26, 2008 | Announcements, Living the Writing Life, On Writing: Craft and Commiseration
#7 Try to finish the book, not just the contest. I failed miserably at this last year and am still kicking myself. November is this crazy creative storm where you have lots of inspiration, support and inspiration. You’d be stupid to not take advantage of that...
by Hillary DePiano | Oct 25, 2008 | Announcements, Living the Writing Life, On Writing: Craft and Commiseration
#6 Do tell people that you are doing NaNoWriMo. There are two great motivators in play when you tell/brag about doing NaNoWriMo. The first is that you will have cheerleaders to root you on. My husband and friends Katie and Grace get huge gold stars for last year for...
by Hillary DePiano | Oct 24, 2008 | Announcements, Living the Writing Life, On Writing: Craft and Commiseration
#5 Don’t get discouraged by other people’s word counts. Some people like to look at where other people are in comparison to them. I like to look at friends because then it’s personal and I can be like, Bob has 10,000 words more than me? The hell he...
by Hillary DePiano | Oct 23, 2008 | Announcements, Living the Writing Life, On Writing: Craft and Commiseration
#4 Save the pep talks. One of the best things about NaNo is the pep talks. They get best selling authors and NaNo alumni to write up inspirational letters to make you want to keep working on your books and email them to you. They are really well written and a huge...
by Hillary DePiano | Oct 22, 2008 | Announcements, Living the Writing Life, On Writing: Craft and Commiseration
#3 Get ahead early. There are two reasons to get ahead on your word count and stock pile a lot of extra words in the beginning. The first is that things come up and you may need these words to make up for days you have to take off later on. Crisis happen unannounced...
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
