Thursday, November 6, 2014

Write With the Door... Open?

Stephen King gives excellent writing advice. If you haven't read his book On Writing, I highly recommend it. It's useful and funny. However, this NaNoWriMo, I'm flying in the face of some of his best writing advice:

"Write with the door closed; rewrite with the door open."

What does that mean?

Well, the quote means you should keep your writing to yourself while you're getting the first draft out, because outside influence is more of a hindrance than a help at that stage. And during the editing process, you should allow others in, because of the old adage that two (or more) heads are better than one.

But this year, for NaNoWriMo, I'm making my in-progress novel publicly available at


so you can watch the first draft develop. I'm still writing in Microsoft Word, but at the end of each day, when I'm done writing, I post what I've written that day (with my total word count so far in the title of the post).

It's experimental, it's fun, and you're welcome to go check it out.

The biggest problem I've already run into is that I already know that in about a week or two, I'm going to really want/need to go back and change some stuff in the writing I've already posted. I haven't yet decided how to deal with that, but I think it might be that if I change something in already-posted content, I'll repost with the changes and mark it as a "rewrite" post. It'll confuse the total word count but that's okay.

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