NaNoWriMo - to fountain pen or not?

[ordinal]

I’m wondering whether to write my NaNoWriMo this year in fountain pen, as I did last year, or actually type it.

Benefits of the fountain pen:

1. I enjoy writing with fountain pens.
2. It really removes the temptation to overly edit, writing by hand. Once it’s there, it’s there. So you just have to get on and write the next sentence, even if the last one was rubbish.
3. I’m aware that the only NNWM I’ve finished has been the one that I wrote in pen. I’m such an appalling over-editor that, in the past, I’d just spent the whole time tweaking paragraphs and changing the plot.

On the other hand:

1. If the novel turns out to be any good, it’s much harder to do anything with it if it’s in longhand. You have to then re-type it.
2. If the novel doesn’t turn out to be any good, but has some good parts - which is far more likely - it becomes a pain to extract the good parts from. You can’t search for them, and you have to type the good parts up once you find them, with the result that you’re less likely to make use of any good parts, in the end.
3. It’s not as securely archived/backed up as if I’d written it digitally.

I still have last year’s novel on the shelf in a binder, and while I very occasionally look at it when I half-remember an idea that I put in there and want to see what I ended up writing, it’s really not a convenient archiving format.

Comments

If you're going to type it...

[(Anonymous)]

If you're going to type it I highly recommend scrivener. When I attempted nano, scrivener helped a lot. Having a native "chapter" or section format built in was helpful in fiddle-reduction. Once something was in a previous section, I considered it closed - my self-enforced rule was, no reading of closed sections while writing. When out anything I wrote I'd email to myself and paste straight in later.

I also used the old TK trick http://lifehacker.com/5129153/use-tk-to-avoid-internet-research-black-holes

These in combination helped me stay on track. I failed the word count, but that was just life throwing up a few things, and was a conscious decision. The actual writing went fine.

Scrivener was a lot of help, as chopping the writing task into chunks made it easier for me to stick to the current chunk. It assists in clearly deliniating the writing, review and editing tasks.

I am a big fan of pens as well, but increasingly finding that I can only scrawl an unreadable mess at the speed that i type, and a barely legible mess if I take my time.

Pavig.

Re: If you're going to type it...

[ordinal]

I did look at Scrivener last year as a possibility, and while I thought it would be an excellent piece of software if I wanted to write a proper novel, I did think that it had too many options and preferences and ways to re-organise things to make it suitable for NNWM for me. If it can be tweaked, I would tweak it.

I was thinking of just plain text files, written with IA Writer or Byword or one of those plain text "distraction free" editors. And possibly locked after I'd finished one. I could move them into Scrivener afterwards to actually do proper work with them.



It is possible to re-learn handwriting by the way - I had to. Whether it is a productive use of time is another matter.