NaNoWriMo - Reverse Mode

I finished NaNo in three weeks and this is how I did it:

In reverse.

I first heard about this method when a friend of mine shared the link over Facebook. The title was intriguing enough that I clicked Reverse NaNoWrimo and it was just one of those light bulb in the head moments.

The ‘rules’ of NaNo say that you write 1,667 words everyday for a month and at the end, lo and behold, you’ve got yourself a 50k novel. That 1.6k daily goal is very easy during the first week or two, when you’re all excited, words are pouring out, and you’re not only meeting the goal, you’re destroying it. But somewhere along the third week your words start to dry out as if the idea faucet has suddenly been turned off, and it becomes an uphill battle to even get 1k. NaNo troopers know this, and for years I've been reading how 'you just have to push through and keep writing.' It's too bad that  pushing doesn't always work.

This is where Reverse Mode comes in. It takes into account this shift in ‘writing mood’ by making use of those first two weeks when we’re all pumped up and ready to type/write until our fingers fall off to get most of the words out. By doing this, it leaves the remaining two weeks with word goals lower than 1.6k, effectively helping out the dry spell that comes on when we reach that stage in NaNo.

It totally worked for me.

Week 1
The word goals were between 3.3k-2.6k. The story was still shinny and fresh in mind, so I reached the goals easily, sometimes even going over by a couple of hundred words.

Week 2
The word goals were from 2.5k-1.8k. Again, I had no trouble achieving this since the muse was still going strong. I sometimes started more than one scene in one day, leaving half of one to work on the next day.

Week 3
The word goals were between 1.7k-1k. Even with fewer words, it's when I started to struggle. Mostly because I decided to play pantser this time around and had no outline whatsoever of my story. I’m a manic plotter by nature, so I fumbled in the end to come up with scenes. But I simply started writing random scenes that came to mind, even if I didn't know where they fit yet. Even when I skipped two days of writing, I recovered quickly and kept on writing.

Week 4
Goals were less than 1k, but I didn’t need them.

I finished NaNo in three weeks!

The NaNo word counter said 50,550 for final count.

After this year, I'm recommending the Reverse Method to any NaNo trooper/writer I come across. I'll definitely be using this to set my own deadline for future projects.

Finished the NaNo Madness

This is what I've been up to. I might return and to talk a bit more about my approach to NaNo this year, because it worked really really well!

At The Movies: Edge of Tomorrow

Movie: Edge of Tomorrow
Stars: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton
My rating: 100/10 

Like...

Where do I even begin?

I'll try not to spoil anything, but apologies if in my excitement I do.



What I loved~

Major William Cage. You all know the joke about Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise in every Tom Cruise movie? Yeah, this is not like that. Well, not entirely. William Cage is sort of a wimp, and seeing Cruise get into that character (an opposite of what he usually plays) was not only amusing, but impressive. He dies over and over again, and most times it's because of stupid moves he makes. Of course, after some hard ass training from Rita, he gets into shape.

Sergeant Rita Vrataski. A famous soldier known as Full Metal Bitch and Angel of Verdun, she is one of the most badass characters I've ever seen in movies. She's strong, smart, determined, takes shit from no one, and makes no apologies for being a woman. I think Emily Blunt was the perfect actress for this role!

The fact that she is a woman in no way stops her from getting right in the middle of the battles, and most soldiers either respect or fear her.

She's so badass that she trains in the middle of the training room, which has revolving metal targets spinning really fast. And she's there doing her stretches and yoga thing, absolutely not giving a fuck.

What I L-O-V-E-D~

Romance? No. Attraction? Yes. I love romance plots and subplots, but lately it's become a sort of requirement for anything and everything, and most often people do a shitty job with portraying healthy relationships between characters. Which is why I'm sort of in love with what they did here. Rita and William don't even like each other when they meet. And even after being stuck together trying to figure out what's happening and how to defeat the mimics, they only grudgingly accept each other. He sticks to Rita because she knows what she is doing. And Rita sticks to him because of his 'power.'

It's only after they've relived days over and over, that we get to see a change in his attitude. Because he, of course, is the only one who remembers everything, while she gets to first meet him everyday. It was a natural progression that led them to that ending scene.

What I LOOOOVVEEEDD~ 

The humor. It was unexpected and I laughed my ass off.

This neat little trick of repeating the same day over and over again. The way it was handled in the movie was absolutely brilliant. The first three times we get almost all of the first full day, but after that, the scenes cut just to certain events and there is enough information in the shot for the viewer to know exactly at what part of the day they're at. It gets complicated when they start venturing outside of what we've seen already, but it's never confusing. It's sort of heartbreaking when he starts to admit things like, this is like the 36th time we've done this and I've seen you die.

"Find me when you wake up!"