Is anyone doing National Novel Writing Month this year? If you are planning on doing it I would suggest starting this month. Starting right now, today, this minute even. Yes, it doesn’t start till November but the biggest thing NaNoWriMo ever taught me was the importance of preparation. And that took me three years to learn.
I did NaNoWriMo two years where my plan was just run in and see what happened. Surely despite the fact that I was fighting to churn out 16,667 words a day, not to mention academic responsibilities, I would be able to hash out a full plot at the same time. As you may have guessed this was not the case at all.
So last year I decided to approach it differently. Admittedly I had also come up with a plot that was going to require a bit of research and I knew I wasn’t going to have time to do that. So I hunted down various resources and writing tools. I tried a few organizing programs for notes and plots and characters. I even printed out one of those outlines where you plot out what happens not only through the whole book but even chapter by chapter. Let me say right now, I didn’t follow that outline perfectly but it was there and that made all the difference.
What I learned last year, when on November 30th, a whole day early, I crawled, panting and wheezing over the 50,000 words marker, was that knowing where you going is half the work to getting there. This doesn’t only apply to NaNoWriMo though, it’s for any writing project. So I highly encourage you to know your plot, plan ahead, plan ahead in detail, before you start writing. Nothing is written in stone, you can still change things if you see the need for it but it will be a huge help in finishing a novel.
0 comments:
Post a Comment