Doyce offers a highly hypothetical example of the costs of rewriting a sentence. They can be mighty, which is why revising stuff during NaNoWriMo is generally advised against.
I will confess that, yesterday, Day 1, I wrote about 1700 words, hitting my hypothetical mark …
… and then I went back and padded it out and fixed some sentences. Because I knew it sucked and I didn’t like it.
And y’know what? It still sucks. Only now it sucks more coherently. But also for longer. I guarantee, as an utter amateur, that an editor looking at that first 1938 words would either suggest I scrap the whole thing, or rewrite it in about 400 words.
I do go on a bit, I know.
So really I’d have been better off writing something much less clever in the first place, then using the effort to get another 1500-odd words into the real story.
But, on the bright side, I didn’t throw out the 1700 words I’d done up front and do that. So I did some rewriting, but I did so in pursuit of both quality and word count (adding 230-odd words). So that’s not a horrible sin.
But it did take me longer than it should have.
Maureen is doing more-or-less daily advice bits for NaNoWriMo.
Yesterday, it was addressing the question of how you find time to write if you already have a job. Bottom line: by giving up other stuff. Sadly, even sf authors don’t have a magical gadget to add more hours to the day.
Today, she talks about making excuses (don’t, just make it up — which is a good reason to set a goal higher than the 1667, because sometimes you will fail to write on a given day). She also talks about embracing your inner suckmonster — because, really, even Shakespeare sometimes sucked, especially when he was writing his first play. (And I can practically guarantee as well that whatever Shakespeare’s first play is, it isn’t in his current canon, because he used it to start a nice toasty fire in his fireplace.)
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