word count VS quality.

[Tender Sweets]

If you type out fifty k worth of nonsensical sentences does it make a novel?

Discuss: What do you think is more important, bulk or quality?

[boyamiconfuzed]

For Nano, bulk. That's the entire point.

...and have you ever read any Surrealist novels? (As in Surrealist art, when the movement started out they did Surrealist everything) They're just a bunch of nonsense sentences.

Edit for the interested: The Magnetic Fields Wikipedia link, has a paragraph from the book. Yes the whole thing is like that.

[Arya Snark]

For NaNo, Bulk is definitely more important, but generally I'm going to say quality is where it's at.

Believe me, I will be going back and editing my stuff when I'm done. I'm mostly just using NaNo to see if I can actually get 50 K (which would be nice, but it wouldn't be the end of the world if I fell short) and to get on a good schedule of writing every night, schoolwork providing.

[Mutant Husband Erik]

Always quality.
If you have a novel that should be around 40k and you push it to 50 all you're doing is bringing down the impact of your work.
No one wants to sit through ten thousand words of filler. They just don't.

So. Yes. If you have bulk, that's great, but you should definitely be more interested in the quality of your writing, whether it's NaNo or not.

[Shad-chan]

I think that there needs to be a balance. The sentences need to all connect together and make sense, and there needs to be a certain level of quality... But given the nature of NaNoWriMo, quantity certainly counts as well. Someone in the NaNo forums gave some great advice: think of your first draft as just a really detailed outline, and don't be too concerned with quality.

[Muffers]

from my personal experience, i'll say this:

last year was all about quality for me. i barely made the 50k deadline (finished about half hour before midnight on the 30th), and despite all the attention i paid to detail and all the quality i thought i was putting into it and taking my sweet, sweet time to write, i still had to edit the damned b***h for three months before i was even happy with it. i had to rewrite the first two chapters entirely, too. and that was only round one of edits; there's bound to be more rounds in the immediate future.

this year, i'm doing twenty-minute sprints of 1k+ each. i do two, maybe three a day, and then once they're done, i casually edit them through and then repeat on the next day. i find this method far more effective and less stressful than the first method, and it's easier on my sanity, too.

i think that as long as you're getting the raw version of your work down, i wouldn't worry too much about the quality. yes, write to the best of your ability -- don't think 'oh, well, she told me not to worry about quality, so i'm going to write garbage like an a*****e.'

no. that's not what i'm saying. i'm saying that no matter how good you think your first draft is during the writing process, it's going to be s**t no matter what. it's your first draft -- of course it's going to be terrible. so don't stress out about it. have fun writing it. add in the details and tackle the continuity errors during edits. writing a novel shouldn't be a chore right from the kick-off.

have a little fun with it. ;D

[Aevona]

I can't sacrifice quality entirely. I just can't. Doing Nano, the quality level of my work definately goes down, but not to a point where my writing becomes meaningless drabble. I include conversations I normally wouldn't, I neglect setting details, there's a heck of a lot of internal thought, but it's all fairly readable stuff. R

egardless of how well I do in the first draft, I know I'm going to edit it all later anyway. That's just how it is. Even so, I'd like to be able to USE what I've written in NaNo. I'm not going to write pages and pages of meaningless crap just for filler. That strikes me as a waste of time.

[Tanabata Wish]

I don't write any differently for NaNo than I do any other time, which for me means that I try to write to the best of my abilities, but I also don't let myself get too hung up on quality and just focus on getting the story down. It's a rough draft. It's not going to be anywhere near perfect no matter how hard I try to make it so. That's what revision and editing and rewrites are fot. With any first draft, including NaNo, my main focus is on getting the story and the main ideas and emotions and details down on paper so I have something to work with later.

[Kikinumi]

I enjoy quality and quantity. As many have already stated, the point of NaNo is to obtain bulk, and that's kind of nice. If you know what you're doing, you can insert a decent amount of quality into your writing and obtain an outcome of something average-ish, I think.

When reading stories, I really like both. Quantity keeps me entertained for long periods of time and quality ensures that the story doesn't end up pissing me off. Actually, just recently I re-read a 250,000 (or so) word fan-fiction, and I can say with very little doubt, that it is one of the absolute best stories I have ever read, and I'm someone who is reading something new practically every day. The quantity of that specific story is awesome, but the quality is even more spectacular.

[Ysavvryl]

Why can't it be both? I aim to have both. But I also have a lot of writing experience and a good typing ability to help me out on that.

For NaNo, I usually say, don't worry too much, just get the story written. Later, you can go back and fix up the quality. And really, a quality piece of writing has been through an editing stage, probably multiple times. If you try for finished fully-polished writing in the first draft stage, then it will take an extremely long time to finish.

[The Madlib Hatter]

NaNo is basically just a brain dump. Get all your ideas and plot in now, and fix everything up later. I know after the month is over, I'll probably have half of what I've written in my final draft. I'm just getting words in right now, editing will come much, MUCH later.

[wingedcatgirl]

NaNo is a first draft. Start with bulk now, add the quality later.

[HomebrewFox]

I'm doing quality straight from the beginning while leaving in the grammar and other various errors in until I come back and revise it. Unless you only want to do NaNoWriMo for the sake of actually doing it and don't care what you do with your book afterwards, it's going to save you a lot of time to just make it work to begin with. I mean, if you write an entire novel of bull s**t that's mostly made up of sentences that are just fillers, even after revising it, it's gonna' be crap. Unless you basically redo the entire story.

[PrincessNeko]

I'm more of the type, it seems who has to consider quantity far more than quality while doing Wrimo. But I'm actually enjoying having my inner editor somewhere in a bottomless well. For one thing, I'm actually ahead of where I should be in the word count and for another, I'm finding surprising places to take my story and characters. I'm not so worried about whether they're valid places, I'm just seeing where their situations lead them while I'm pressured to come up with something (anything!) and sometimes I'm actually pleasantly surprised.

It's also strange to say, but I'm kinda' seeing where my brain overfocuses (like characterization...saying instead of showing) and where it's lacking when I think up of a story. So my weaknesses when it comes to writing (particularly procrastination and a sense of perfectionism wherein I won't write it if it isn't exactly how I want it) comes to the fore and I'll have to deal with them during the editing phase and hopefully learn how to balance them in future projects.

I'm enjoying this method, but I can somewhat see where the quality advocates are coming from as well. I mean, you do get five free paperback copies of a finished book as a prize...

[ReidenLightman]

Tender Sweets

If you type out fifty k worth of nonsensical sentences does it make a novel?

Discuss: What do you think is more important, bulk or quality?

I think bulk is what should be achieved when you aim for quality. When you add more in to make things more clear, exciting, poetic, romantic, or whatever, then you end up with a quality bulk.

I have aimed not to add any sort of fluff the entire time. I am making sure every line, every dialogue, every observation is relevant at some point in the story. And by writing all my chapters out of order, it's allowed me to plan ahead, and develop things a lot more beautifully. If I find a line that turns out to be irrelevant or seemingly unaddressed later in the writing, I take it out without a second thought. I then make sure that everything else around it still flows as intended.

Bulk is nice, but it's just filler if it's not quality. It would be like reading this post 100 times in a row, or reading one of Stephanie Meyer's books. I mean, seriously, how the hell did she get published. More than half of her books is bulk fluff about how dreamy the main character thinks the vampire is. I don't want to read that every other page. I get it.

I remind my readers of certain important things for the first few chapters it is introduced. After that, they should have it dedicated to memory as they read. My characters accent should not need to be mentioned on chapters four and up. It's mentioned before, so why again?

Bulk is never good when it is fluff or filler. That is the worst kind of bulk. You should make your bulk engaging, changing, and dynamic. That gives it quality.

NOTE: How do I write in bulk the first time and retain quality? I write rough drafts in my head by playing it like a movie, and tweaking it there until it's just how I like it. This eliminated 20 minutes of re-writing when I want to take a few lines out of a scene.

Aim for Quality. Then aim for even higher quality. The right amount of bulk will find its way in.