Frantic Scribbling

It's now Day 12 of NaNoWriMo and the target wordcount for the end of the day is 20,000.  We've had eleven days of hard-working, excited students hammering away at the keyboards, churning out words at a rate of knots.  The progress they've made has been absolutely stunning, with many of them putting in extra time at break, lunch and for an hour and a half after school.  It's the after school sessions that have been making the most significant difference, when they all gather in the computer area and we go for twenty and ten minute word sprints.  All you can hear is the clacking of keys, until the alarm goes and the sighs of relief, shrieks of frustration or pent up giggles escape.  They're making good use of our virtual classroom and have been posting discussions on the forum, sharing ideas and working collaboratively when they need to. 

I think it's starting to dawn on them quite how much hard work NaNoWriMo is.  They're starting to realise what writing is when it becomes a job and how very, very easy it is to get up and do something else.  A couple of them have developed the shakes and several are well on their way to yelling out seemingly irrelevant words in class as their novels start to take over their minds.  I feel slightly as though I'm creating an army of vaguely confused mini-mes.  Today, we'll celebrate the end of the second school NaNo week with plenty of snacks and some mammoth word sprints as they all get a head start at the weekend rush.  They're making excellent use of Write or Die.

For the first time ever, I'm ahead!  Having switched my home computer over to mac a while ago, I've been working this time using Scrivener, which is making a frightening amount of difference to how difficult the process of writing can seem.  Annoyingly, the things that it's doing that make it seem so much easier are things that I could quite easily have done myself before: proper outlining, breaking up the text into manageable chunks.  I don't know about you, but when I'm in the midst of trying to make a piece of writing sound the way I think it's supposed to, I utterly lose sight of such things as logic and organisation.  Scrivener puts the logic in front of you, pats you on the head and tells you that everything will be fine. 

They've just released the Windows version in Beta, so I'm trying that out on the office computer.  No hiccoughs yet, and my home file from the mac seems fully compatible.  Hoping that for next year we'll be able to consider buying it for the library machines, to return to our novelists the logic that seems to be fleeing from many of them, screaming.