Nonfiction book writing in November and daily wordcount posting

[brainwane]

I am writing a book about open source maintainership. I had planned to get the book to editors/agents by the end of this year; I have made very little progress on it this year so now my goal is to have a small self-published early version of the book available by the end of the year.

Recently I wrote up a blog post about how the hobby writing project I did Sept-Oct felt doable for me, and how to apply those lessons to my book project I've been procrastinating on. Having a little writing prompt every day feels like it will help. I'm also planning on blogging stuff as I write it, or posting it publicly somewhere. Maybe a GitLab repo to start?

November -- there's NaNoWriMo. It's for novels. I saw that there are some rebels who use it for nonfiction, but I don't want to deliberately contravene the goals of NaNoWriMo so I'm not signing up for it formally, but I am committing to writing each day in November as a way to accumulate a lot of progress and momentum for the book.

Today I sat down with Leonard and he helped me restore my faith in my current outline, and I developed a template for each chapter which will make it easier for me to write them, and I wrote seven writing prompts so now I have writing exercises/chapters to start for each day in the coming week.

I also signed up for a daily words community on Dreamwidth, thedailywriter, to give myself people I am accountable to. I will also tell y'all: I want to write 400 words per day in November, as a minimal goal. On good days I know I will blow way past that! But just -- every day I want to write at least 400 words.

Any of you doing daily writing in November? If you're posting daily "I wrote [number] words!" then where are you doing that? (Edited to add: Or whatever your writing goal is -- duration-based, for instance.) I'd like to join in.

[Cross-posted to Cogito, Ergo Sumana]

Comments

[ursula]

I intend to do daily writing in November! But I usually just make a Twitter post with the #amwriting hashtag (or #AcWriMo for academic writing). Tracking time (often 20 minutes minimum) rather than word count works better for me, because I am slow.

[brainwane]

Perhaps I, too, will toot and tweet! Thanks for the reminder about different daily goals - I edited the post.

[lindseykuper]

I'm excited about your book project!

I'm thinking about doing at least 30 minutes of writing per day on weekdays, which is something I'm supposed to be doing anyway for the research productivity support group I'm in. I think tracking time instead of words is a good choice when you want to include tasks like outlining or editing or making figures and so on.

Have you read Tressie McMillan Cottom's "How I Write" blog post? I haven't tried to apply this advice myself, but it sounds pretty powerful:

Then at the top of the document I typed two questions:

What do I know?

How do I know it?

And then I started answering the questions.

Sentence after sentence I chose one thing that I knew and then I explained how I knew it. You can probably still see this in the structure of the overall book. It is: set up, description, explanation, integration with previous explanations. Over and over again.

I think "What's one thing I know about open source maintainership, and how do I know it?" could be a good writing prompt.

[brainwane]

Thanks for the kind wishes and for the link! I'd read that Cottom piece before but it has new resonance now as I try to write something longform.

I will probably experiment with different writing prompts! Right now I am using a sort of template of things I want to cover in each chapter/section/thing (like "what is the problem? why does it exist? what skills do you need to address it?" and so on) and then daily topic prompts (like "running a meeting" or "contributors who submit poor patches"). Over the next few days I will see more about how it goes....

I hope your first weekday of the month is one in which you are able to do the 30 minutes of writing that you want to do!

[sanguinity]

I have a daily writing habit. I check in with the roving Write Every Day community, which this month is being hosted by the_siobhan. (Intro post here.) You might have seen me hosting WED back in... August, I think it was. Everyone sets whatever goals they please, but the community default is a single sentence. (Aka the "alibi sentence": it's funny how often one might say to oneself "I can't manage [wordcount] today, but I CAN do a sentence," and the next thing you know, you have a paragraph or three. Or sometimes you really do stop at a sentence, and that's fine, too: even though the proverbial shit hit the fan, you still engaged with your manuscript, keeping the pumps primed for the next day, if you will.)

Good luck with your manuscript -- I wish you all success!

[brainwane]

Ooooh thanks I am joining this month's WED!