Word Sprints

Word sprints help you write fast, hence the name. They may or may not have a prompt to help you with a topic to write on. They can be timed (10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour); they can be word counts (100, 200, 1000 words); they can be housed on Twitter (NaNo Word Sprints), done in groups or individually, and can even take the form of competitions.

The whole purpose of word sprints is, like NaNoWriMo, to get your words on paper. You can edit later. I may be using more word sprints this year because I'm not having as many conversations with my characters as I usually do. (I need a good amount of time at a coffeehouse this weekend with Richard to help flesh out plot and character.)

Not everyone believes in the common philosophy behind NaNo and writing sprints -- that is, that the words need to get put on paper, in whatever form, before you can polish your work into a novel. This columnist is very much against NaNo, thinking it gives less talented people a license to make their friends read their bad work. (I would have welcomed her point of view had she not come off as a caustic snob who likes to piss on others' dreams).
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Here's the result of a ten-minute word sprint for my WIP, with the prompt of "Someone is getting thirsty":


The next day I’d wished I’d stayed at the curious place where I had dropped off the stranger the night before. The air shimmered with the heat; I sweated until I couldn’t sweat more. My goal was to drive out of Owayee and back toward the larger highways, because everything in this heatbox looked the same — the short scrubby shrubs, the baked-mud ground pebbled with rocks of varying size, the lack of true greens and flowers. Was it simply going back the way I came? Even with a map, I wasn’t quite sure what highway I looked at. 

There was a lake by where I’d dropped off the affable, enigmatic Daniel. If I could get back to the lake, I would be near water and could take shelter with the commune. They had offered me shelter, but I wanted to continue on my quest. 

Of course, my compass, I thought, and grabbed it from the passenger’s seat with one hand. Of course, as luck would have it, the compass couldn’t recognize true north. I thought the commune had been true north from where I was on the road. 

I drank the last dregs of water from my jug, remembering that I’d filled two five-gallon water bags from the commune’s reservoir. They had been generous. Mari, the leader, had smiled at me and said, “We have plenty more where that came from, Annie.” I felt like crying as the nausea hit me. Then I felt the truck shimmy as my front right tire ripped from the rim.

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Is this a first draft? Yes. Upon reexamining it, I know it's going to take some more filling in, and some wordsmithing. I use "of course" two times consecutively to start sentences. I don't like "true greens and flowers" as a phrase, exactly, because it brings to mind lettuces rather than vibrant green hues. "There was a lake" should read "I recalled there was a lake". Her recall of the commune could be slightly more descriptive.

But that was 25 words a minute on something I hadn't thought about five minutes before.

I'm okay with that.