NaNoWriMo 2012 - Day 12

[ladyseishou]

Day 12 - 18 days remaining



If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully,
with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’
But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary,
sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a
quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and,
boy, the reader believes!

— Fred East






Today's word count is 20,004! A banner day and time to indulge in a 10k reward if you got one. Otherwise, congratulate yourself on a job well done coming this far!

And if you are a little short, no need to dispair. Could be time to indulge in a little word padding. No, not the kind where you write out contractions or quote long passages of poetry - time for that later, maybe.

No this is the kind of "padding" that might actually add a little 3D to a character that might feel a bit flat. Read through today's quote again and see where "showing" (instead of "telling") infuses a little bit of reality into your fictional people.

So instead of writing: "He was happy to see her come through the door" for a total of ten words, why not write the scene as: "He felt the smile come over him, like the sun chasing shadows, worries about the day's troubles fading too as he watched her push the door open and come into Lucky's Laundromat carrying that ridiculous red Santa sack of what he could only speculate was elf unmentionables, assuming elves even had what one might stuff into unmentionables." Fifty-seven words.

Purple prose? Maybe. But it's got words. And some of it might even survive the editor's pen later down the road.

Questions? Comments? Your best purple prose? It's all good! So keep writing!

Comments

[eien_herrison]

My characters tend go introspective/stream of consciousness on an alarming basis (even outside of NaNoWriMo) but it does tend to give me 500+ words on their inner thoughts. The most recent one was my main character mulling on whether to use a Thunderstone (given to her by Alice, the trainer she was with while traversing Mount Moon) on Pikachu or not.

Total wordcount: 35,125, of which 2,997 was written today. WriteWay is showing a bit of an inflated wordcount for today as it's counting the 1.9k I wrote yesterday. Mon & Tues aren't great writing days for me, but I'm hoping the word count will pick up from Thursday onwards -- I might hit 50k by the end of the weekend :)

I'm also now getting the urge to write on a new story, and I think I'm going to put that down for December for my warm-up to my 2013 Year of Writing.

[ladyseishou]

A fantastic word count! And a great writing day! And I wouldn't worry about introspective characters - you're capturing their thoughts and perspectives which is important now and that can always be rewritten as outward action later if you want to fine tune and balance your story's pacing.

I think you will certainly hit 50k by the weekend at this rate! *cheers madly*

[eien_herrison]

With introspective characters, I always worry that they'll turn out to sound the same -- no one's accused me of doing so, but I always have that feeling at the back of my mind.

With 15k left, at my current rate of an average of 3k a day I should be finished by Saturday, earlier if I manage to get a lot of words written Weds-Sun :)

[stickpenalties]

I don't really want to talk about how low my total is, but I wrote 4069 words today!

[ladyseishou]

That's a great day's writing! Wow! Sounds like you really got into it. Keep that up and you'll not only catch the word count but leave it in the dust!