I gather that one of the points of NaNoWriMo is to try to force encourage you to write every day without thinking much about what you are writing...
I've always said that I'll never do it, simply because I *don't* write two thousand words a day, and never have done. Well, not since I was in my twenties and had an awful lot of suppressed creativity to let out in one fell swoop.
I do force myself to write every day in the ordinary run of things, though -- well, when I'm in the middle of a story and want to reach the end of it, that is. I just don't get anything like two thousand words out of the exercise, or aim to do so.
(I am doing quite well with the drabbles and will almost certainly succeed in finishing the month -- for a grand total of 3,000 words! -- but even so that rapidly reached the stage where I wasn't even starting the day's drabble until after midnight, on the grounds that I could 'do it quickly' (which of course I can't). And like most NaNoWriMo players, I'm learning that planning in advance is more or less essential.)
The big advantage of starting with short stories is that you get practice with endings. (In the nature of things most people have a lot of experience of hopeful starts, but much less of actually bringing a narrative to a conclusion...)
Although I can't talk, because I don't know that I ever finished *anything* until I started writing fan-fiction... and thinking about it, with hindsight I'm pretty sure the reason for that was not so much that the fan-fiction was shorter (because my early fanfics actually were novel-length sagas) but that for the first time in my life I coincidentally found myself planning the entire story through to the end before I wrote anything. Previously I'd always invented the plot as I went along, which meant that when I ran out of inspiration or got tired of writing, the story simply died. The fanfics were stories that I told to myself in my head and then decided to write down *afterwards*, which meant first of all that they had already undergone a winnowing process by being the ones that had not petered out midway, and secondly that I knew in considerable detail where they were going to end up and all the points along the way, and could thus keep going even without the impetus of new-dawning inspiration (and had a motive for wanting to do so, because I knew the ending was worth it).
But as a general principle from my own accidental experience I should definitely recommend starting with short stories of two or three scenes (bearing in mind that "All the Rules Rearranged", for one, was conceived as being a single chapter in three scenes), simply because you have the end there in sight before you, and it's nice and reachable. You get the experience of writing a whole thing, and finishing it, and tying off the ends, and it takes place over a timescale within which you can reasonably hope to maintain interest. Plugging away at something where the end is infinitely distant requires an awful lot of self-motivation, and having a number of past successes under your belt goes a long way towards making that possible.
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forceencourage you to write every day without thinking much about what you are writing...I've always said that I'll never do it, simply because I *don't* write two thousand words a day, and never have done. Well, not since I was in my twenties and had an awful lot of suppressed creativity to let out in one fell swoop.
I do force myself to write every day in the ordinary run of things, though -- well, when I'm in the middle of a story and want to reach the end of it, that is. I just don't get anything like two thousand words out of the exercise, or aim to do so.
(I am doing quite well with the drabbles and will almost certainly succeed in finishing the month -- for a grand total of 3,000 words! -- but even so that rapidly reached the stage where I wasn't even starting the day's drabble until after midnight, on the grounds that I could 'do it quickly' (which of course I can't). And like most NaNoWriMo players, I'm learning that planning in advance is more or less essential.)
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Perhaps it would be better to start with short stories, then finish this novella (I'm pretty sure it's a novella), and then try a novel.
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Although I can't talk, because I don't know that I ever finished *anything* until I started writing fan-fiction... and thinking about it, with hindsight I'm pretty sure the reason for that was not so much that the fan-fiction was shorter (because my early fanfics actually were novel-length sagas) but that for the first time in my life I coincidentally found myself planning the entire story through to the end before I wrote anything. Previously I'd always invented the plot as I went along, which meant that when I ran out of inspiration or got tired of writing, the story simply died. The fanfics were stories that I told to myself in my head and then decided to write down *afterwards*, which meant first of all that they had already undergone a winnowing process by being the ones that had not petered out midway, and secondly that I knew in considerable detail where they were going to end up and all the points along the way, and could thus keep going even without the impetus of new-dawning inspiration (and had a motive for wanting to do so, because I knew the ending was worth it).
But as a general principle from my own accidental experience I should definitely recommend starting with short stories of two or three scenes (bearing in mind that "All the Rules Rearranged", for one, was conceived as being a single chapter in three scenes), simply because you have the end there in sight before you, and it's nice and reachable. You get the experience of writing a whole thing, and finishing it, and tying off the ends, and it takes place over a timescale within which you can reasonably hope to maintain interest. Plugging away at something where the end is infinitely distant requires an awful lot of self-motivation, and having a number of past successes under your belt goes a long way towards making that possible.