and now a little nano advice to drive up wordcount AND save your fingers a little stress...
-- do not use contractions. this will drive up your wordcount faster than you could imagine.
-- do not capitalize. it will save your fingers time and stress. this includes not capitalizing your apostrophes to make quotation marks. you can fix those later if you do a 2nd draft.
-- do not go back and fix your plot. make notes in another document about what you want to fix.
-- if you feel like you must delete something, highlight it, then use strike-through or make the words white. at least then you can't see them, but the words will still be counted.
-- use auto-complete in Word. this is my favorite feature and can do all kinds of things for you. you can set it to capitalize your "I"'s, put the apostrophes in your contractions, and complete names. for example, all the names in my novel are done in auto-complete. i just put in a shorter version (i.e. kir for Kieran, js for Jessa, ara for Arathor, tel for Teleria, etc) and then i don't have to type their full names everytime they come up.
that's all i could think of for now, but if i have any more nuggets of goodness, i'll post them some other time.
best wishes on your nano project, or whatever project you find yourself doing this month.
1 comment:
Amusing. I avoid contractions for the most part in writing but can't stand not capitalizing. Just like I don't like not having obvious paragraphs, which makes me a bit leery of using Write-of-Die cause I have to reformat when I take it from the site and paste to my document. But some good tips.
And definitely don't go back and erase, even if starting over the novel. (I've known people to do this.) Just keep writing and take out stuff that won't work in rewrite.
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