Tandem Writing

15,025 words.

Getting along nicely.

I met up with some of the other Nanos in Honolulu last night at a coffee shop near our place. I don't recall ever having done tandem writing before, but that's what we did last night. I got there, talked out my villains (who were lacking names and individual personalities) with the guy sitting next to me, and then we wrote. Later, this lady who is one of the two local meet-up organizers got together a word war. This is when you set a time limit, say, fifteen minutes, then you say 'go', and then you write like, say, crazy until the fifteen minutes are up.

It's a mad-dash of storytelling. I wrote about as much in that fifteen minutes as I had written in the previous hour. Granted, there was less talking just then, and less character development. Just a scramble to get out what was going on. I got out a two-page conversation of foreshadowing. Immediately afterwards, I thought, 'Oh crap, I'm just gonna have to cut all of this, re-write it elsewhere.' But then I got home, read it over, and realized it has actually opened up a whole new level to my story that I would have missed out on if I hadn't been in that particular storytelling mindset. Awesome.

It was really fun. Will do this again next week.