Atfore

NaNoWriMo

By Leslie on October 11th, 2009

It’s certainly that time of the year, and I like many folks are preparing for NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month). Last year I both participated and won.

Yay me!

Well sort of Yay me. I won, that is I wrote 50,000 words, actually more like 60,000 words, but they should have probably gone directly into the bit bucket. They were that bad.

So this year I am planning, plotting, characterizing. I have timelines, research, snowflakes, outlines, etc. I am determined that I will not be staring at October 31 with a empty Scrivener Project (devoid of any planning or research materials) and a song in my heart. It certainly does help that I am gainfully underemployed this month and plan to spend hours each day writing and planning for November.

So, what have I been doing?

Well, last week was WriMo Prep Week 1: My novel is a time travel historical fiction set in both the 1990s and gold rush California. So there is lots of good and fun historical research to do. Luckily for me, I love both research and history. Oooh Fun!

Unfortunately, I already have much of this done, since it was so much fun and I love doing it. So not so much left to do this month. Sigh. But not to worry there is more to occupy my busy brain for the rest of the month. Having a project management bent, I am approaching this systematically – in sections of work:

History:
Not a lot to do this month. Random fact checking and organizing references so I can find things fast in November. I am planning some entertaining reading of journals and diaries so I can get the language down. I figure by the end of November I should be talking like a proper mid-19th century lady.

Characterization:
I have my main characters and major supporting characters well worked out. Now I need to be sure that they are really multidimensional and are reacting in ways that you or I would expect in the situations that I have placed them. Last summer, Mike Munsil over at Liberty Hall sponsored a novel jump-start planning month-long challenge called Mid Sommer Madness. One of the suggestions out of that was to use Meyers-Briggs Analysis on our characters. As a business consultant, I loved this! Too funny, but it did help me to sort out some inconsistencies between my characters. Very helpful! I am not done here and still have some fleshing out on some of my supporting characters. I find role playing helps here too.  It’s fun and informative to just pretend to be the character for awhile.

Plot:
Ahhh, this is where the rubber is going to hit the road this month. I want to make sure that I have all the plot twists and turns pretty well laid out. I was able to work out much of this during the Liberty Hall MidSommer Madness Challenge but I have more work to do. My goal is to have a paragraph summary for each chapter with an arc for the major and minor plots before I start writing. I am planning on around 40 chapters for a 80,000 word book.  I’m about 2/3 of the way there and with 30 paragraphs, but I figure I will rewrite this least twice before the end of the month as I sync up with the timeline and the characters.

WorldBuilding:
Because this is a time travel story I need to have the elements of my world pretty well worked out before I start. I know what the end points look like: 1990′s and mid 1800′s, but I need to develop the rules that allow my characters to get there and back again…or do the get back…..hmmm. I have also found that to be able to think about a story like this I need timelines and detailed ones. So I have created two timelines, one for each time. It helps me think about who is doing what to whom and when. Time travel is very complicated!

So, there we have the 4 big chunks of my month. I’ll update a bit more on this as NaNoWriMo approaches.

Happy writing!