ROW 80 - Goals

You can find more info about ROW 80 here. Basically, it's a writing challenge where you set the goals for 80 days. There are four (80-days) rounds in a year, the next one starts tomorrow.

And since I have a degree now, NaNoWriMo is over and I'm still looking for a job, this seems the perfect time to finally join! So here're my goals for the 1st round of 2012:

• write at least 500 words 4 days per week
• fix at least a chapter per week from my 2010 NaNoWriMo novel

This might not seem much, but I know about myself that I don't like repetitiveness - which means writing each day isn't a good advice for me. Cue the 4 days I didn't write a word during November. You can call it 'laziness', I call it 'rebelliousness' and I can't really do anything about it.

Anyway, I'd rather start with smaller steps and with a plan than greater ambitions and failure in the end. I can always write more if I have inspiration, right? Right.

Let's see how this ROW80 challenge works for me. Good luck to you, if you're also participating!

Do you make any New Year's resolutions?

Happy New Year! \^o^/

PS.: I think I'm going to do one blog post about this per week (check-in). That, in itself is a challenge for me...

Memoirs

Better late than never, they say.

The week before last, we were discussing memoirs. We learnt that biographies are between fact and fiction and there're two types: autobiographies and classical biographies (external). And two other categories for the first one: self-help autobiography (to show yourself to the World) or fictionized autobiography, which is not in chronological order.

The first autobiography novel was written by Augustinus, the title was 'Confessions'. Back then, a biography was called an 'apology'. Interesting, isn't it?

Rousseau wrote the second autobiography.

Autobiography is 70% stream of consciousness-novels (about your feelings, etc.) and 30% facts.

Writing practice:

+ Write one of your days, of your feeling.

+ You have a minute to write anything that comes to mind when hearing the word 'rock' (free association-game).

We also talked about how books are made - in Hungary. I think my next post would be about that, I found an interesting thing to contemplate about, regarding this topic.

Challenge!

I took on a creative writing course at the University this semester. The first lesson was on Thursday, and as far as I can see, we'll be focusing on the various genres. E. g. Memoirs, Utopias & Distopias, Fairy Tales, Historic novels... AND there'll be a lesson dedicated to Translation & Editing.

We need to turn in an essay and one of our own texts. I'm already done with my essay. We had 3 topics to choose from:
1) The reason why literature exists
2) My favourite texts
3) A text by me

I went with the first one. Because A) How can you ask a writer for her favourite text? Clearly, she has many. And I was a bit lazy trying to decide which ones should I include. B) Usually, I takes me minimum 7 pages to write a whole short-story, otherwise it'll be a bit... ungainly. This task also said that the writing should be around 3-5 pages.

And I wanted to create something new to reflect my current writing style (though on second thought, I don't know if the first choice can really do that) and I usually have novel-lenght ideas. A bit harder for me to write a complete short story.

For the record, I was thinking for days what to write in my essay. 'The reason why literature exists'... Eventually, I had several point of views and opinions to choose from.

So, with this creative writing course and November coming (NaNoWriMo!) and starting my thesis, I won't be bored this semester. (Did I mention lots of seminars, yet?)