Ubuntu 8.04 has the honor of being the main excuse for not writing enough in the NaNoWriMo ’08. So before telling about my experience with the writing event I can already report that I certainly won’t make it to the 50.000 words that are required to ‘finish’ succesfully. But maybe it helped me to – after many days of trying, reading and retrying – get Linux/Ubuntu running. After the installing came a long lasting and enjoyable task of looking what it all was about and of finding and trying out new programs for just about everything -including writing. Unfortunately the program I used to organize and write the whole NaNoWriMo project is Windows based and doesn’t work well in Linux (using Wine) and I have some difficulties getting the mail program and its todo-list and calender to work as I want it to. The whole underlying structure of Linux and its possibilities are not very clear to me yet and it seems I have to run “sudo-apt install ‘some years of knowledge and experience’ ‘ somewhere before I truly can get to terms with it. So be it -because so far I like it.
Forfatter: Bart Westgeest
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Ubuntu surpressed my NaNoWriMo ’08
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Nanowrimo 08
This year I decided to join the group of about 100.000 people that each one of them will try to write a 50.000 words novel in the month of November. Everything is allowed as long as it is fiction-novel and every one of the 50.000 words is written in this one month. In order to reach the number of words one has to write 1667 words a day on average, so the idea is to have fun and just write and don’t look back. Editing and rewriting is for the month of December or for 2009.
You can read all about it on the www.nanowrimo.org page.
I worked out a plot and I am basically ready to start. It would be nice to be able to “win” the challenge and reach this magical number of words, but I am already enjoying the enthusiasm of the whole project.
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Natalie Goldberg – Writing Down the Bones
I can understand why Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” is a bestseller. It is a inspiring book with a mission: To get people to write as a habit in an honest and spontaneous way. She advocates the practice of freewriting – that is to sit down and start filling up that white paper. Don’t think but trust yourself and let your pen do the work. In her opinion the best writing is done this way – messages from the heart – unfiltered by ego or too much intellect.
The book is divided into 64 short chapters and most are – as Natalie says herself – written in one session. In these many chapters she deals with many aspects and problems one might encounter when creating the habit of writing as a act in itself. It was interesting to read her approach to deal with the feelings connected to it – the voices inside of us. To beat one’s worst criticizer – oneself – is the key to good writing.
This approach of training writing skills by continual practice for the sake of practice might not be for everyone, but maybe it should be. I think that every writer or would-be writer at least should try it.
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Organize your Stories
While playing a game of cards it struck me how important it is to organize well. First it looks like the cards don’t combine and that I have no chance of winning the game, but when I start to sort them it suddenly becomes clear how my chances really are and what I am missing. So it actually changes my perception of my chances and possibilities and makes me feel far more secure and optimistic. It helps to get a good flow into the game.
It is obvious that the same is true for my writing and that is why I spend a good deal of time tagging, sorting, editing and collecting the pieces, stories and poems I have. I made a map with stories that I think are finished and stories I need to work on, and there is a third map with stories (and ideas) that didn’t make it to the second “almost done” map.
In an attempt to catch things I might have deemed “unworthy of any map” in the first place I implemented the habit of going through a random page in my journaling software (There is a shortcut for it) at least once a week.
It is satisfying and motivating to know more or less precise what the actual state of my writing is.
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Just Write
When words come quickly and my fingers barely can keep up with the stream of thoughts I usually don’t stop to look up a word in a dictionary. My English vocabulary isn’t too big unfortunately so I sometimes use words in three different languages. My own, that of the country I live in and English. In this way I keep the flow when freewriting.
When editing I translate the foreign words into English and this helps me to build a vocabulary of my own.
Sometimes these non-English words express something in a certain way that can be hard to translate and that keeps my writing personal.