ARE YOU READY FOR #NANOWRIMO 2020? (Part One)
Are you ready to crush NaNoWriMo? Are you ready to call down the lightning and thunder of the gods like Thor with his hammer and wreak beautiful havoc on the dragons of creativity? Do you have all your powerful analogies and sensory descriptors all lined up and ready to march onto the page like the card soldiers of the Queen of Hearts?
No? Me, either. But I am organized and ready to bust out those 1666.666 words every day come hell, giant flying pigs, or Coronavirus 2021. While I may not crank out the next NYT Bestseller or movie-optioned thriller, I will produce a very solid manuscript that I will edit and publish less than two months later because I have a plan.
Like my pocket writing and fighting guide Dojo to Page: Write Fight Scenes, I have broken down the preparation for writing a novel in a month into Six Simple Steps.
STEP ONE: DECIDE ON A STORY
While this may seem like a Well, duh…, it can be harder than it sounds. Creative types like us are, well, creative and also typically a little anxious and neurotic when it comes to the vast multiple universes that spin on sometimes dissonant axis in our brain. You may have only vague ideas of some books that you think it would be cool to write someday and so Why not now? Or, like me, you may have a very long but organized list of stories to choose from.
Either way, this can be disproportionately the most difficult part of getting your NaNoWriMo plan together. My best advice as a long-term writing teacher is to remember that this story is only one of many you will write, not the only one you will ever write. This is not your only chance ever in your entire existence to write that story. This is your first or second or forty-third chance. There will be many more.
If you have no ideas, steal one from our vast history of literature like my fairytale retellings (Witch in the Woods is free on Bookfunnel). If you have too many, put them on slips of paper and draw one out of a hat. Either way, think of it like this—whatever story idea you choose for the month, you’re in a relationship with it for one month. I’m sure you’ve dated some pretty lousy losers for longer than that. You can handle this.
Choose. Commit. Move on to the next step.
STEP TWO: OUTLINE YOUR STORY
Those of you who consider yourselves outliners by nature just felt a wave of validation. Those of you who think of yourselves as ‘pantsers’ just had a hundred tiny little arguments against outlining scurry through your mind like a miniature herd of hybrid otterducks.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love pansters because they rack up quite a pretty little invoice for us editors. But if you’re going to crush NaNoWriMo, you’re going to need an outline.
The truth is that we all go through the same writing process regardless of whether we write it down or try to keep it all in our heads like the geniuses we are. ‘Outliners’ do their writing process one grand phase of the process at time and ‘pansters’ do their outlining and drafting in mini-cycles. It’s not like pantsers get to skip the outlining step. It’s what’s happening while you’re staring at the screen and not drafting when you are supposed to be blurping out your 1666.666 words for the day.
The writing process looks like this:
Prewriting (outlining)—Drafting (blurping)—Revising (changing big chunks)—Editing & Proofreading (hiring me)—Publishing (self or traditional)
Your brain moves from the most right-brained part of the process to the most left-brained part of the process and doesn’t really like to be in two parts of the process at the same time. That means that if you’re staring at your screen trying to come up with the story while you’re drafting, you’re sharing your drafting time with your outlining time. Ain’t nobody got time for that. This is the number one quitting point in the process and it’s 98.725% avoidable if you outline ahead of time.
I prefer to start my outline on good old-fashioned notecards. I write down my major scene ideas and fill in the gaps and move the pieces around until I feel like I have them in the right order. I also make sure that I have hit all the major points of my story arc in my scenes.
I used to go straight from notecards to drafting, and that worked okay. Recently I started using a handy new app called Plottr to plug my outline notecards into what basically works like digital notecards. Plottr also has outline templates that can help you nail your major plot points and it exports directly to both Word and Scrivener. More on all of that in the next section.
STEP THREE: GATHER YOUR TOOLS
Along with the wand and necromancer grimoire that you have in your imagination, you’ll also need some very practical real-life tools in place to write your novel in the 30 days of NaNoWriMo—or any 30 days of any month or cross-section of months.
First, I’m assuming you have some sort of computer that you plan to use. I’m also assuming that most of you have a laptop and dreams of writing a bestseller on it at a little café in Paris. Let’s put a pin in that dream for a moment and make sure that your current electronic device of choice is the right one for you.
Laptops have the advantage of being very mobile and allow you to write anywhere. Maybe that’s your best choice to squeeze that word count in while you’re waiting for your daughter in the dance school parking lot or at the airport the recommended two hours before your flight. Perfect. That’s certainly the way I roll. However, don’t discount the one major advantage of a desktop—it requires you to commit to a time and place for your BIC (Butt In Chair) and that can be the difference between reaching your word count or looking at your NaNo badge in grayscale.
You’re very likely going to use whatever you have, but if you need a laptop with more BIC leverage, you can always glue it to the table.
Other tools that might not be on your radar quite yet are a few programs that actually help produce books. Like I mentioned before, I plug my outline into Plottr. I mashed-up a couple of different templates to make my own Ultimate Template. This gives me a significant advantage in being able to see where my story hits the all the right money-making plot twists and emotional notes before all those drafting hours.
Plottr exports your plot to either Word or Scrivener for the drafting process. I have tried both programs and prefer Word for my projects although I know several authors who prefer Scrivener for its more complex functions. At this point in the pre-game, you should do some research among your friends or author groups to find what you might want to implement for your own increased productivity.
Christine Nielson is a professional freelance editor at www.nielsoneditingco.com. She specializes content and line edits for fantasy and science fiction works. She is writing Jack and the Queen of Daggers for NaNoWriMo 2020 under CNielson if you want to be buddies. You can find her fiction at www.queensandcrows.com.
Continue to Part Two… (click the header at the bottom of the page)