4 posts tagged “nano prep”

2nd post of the day, 2 weeks until NaNoWriMo. And no so long ago I was bragging that I had my plot all planned out so I would not be blogging my NaNo prep. Well I got bitten by a plot bunny and for the last couple of days I've be planning industriously. With 2 and a half weeks left I decided to *gasp* change my idea! I must have been too organised. I'm ready to start writing Blue Blood right now, but that's clearly not enough of a challenge in the eyes of the NaNo gods, so I'm running with this new thing for now and seeing where it takes me. There just something about going from idea conception to finished first draft in a couple of months that really appeals to me. Last year I started planning around 2 months, 1 week, 2 days before NaNo, as last year's blog post will testify, so 2 weeks will really be something of a challenge for me.

This year I'm writing my solution to the whole 'chosen one' plot line. We all know the drill. One boy/girl, preferably from humble background, is phophesised to be 'the chosen one' who will defeat the greatest evil in the land and be a great hero. I'm not sure why this plot is so appealing. Perhaps it's something to do with the reluctant hero who has this great destiny thrust upon him that he must rise to 'or else'. Anyway, I thought it might be nice for a change to have the hero of the story become a hero because he actually wants to, not because some old hag 1000 years ago wrote it in a scroll. So, my hero Devon is the only person with no destiny in a kingdom where the future of every child is prophesised at their birth, and in his story he's going to have to actually exercise some free-will and make choices for himself. As the one guy who can actually be anything that he wants to be what choices will he make? There's kind of a Willow 'which finger controls your destiny' thing going on, so it should be fun.

Last year I tried out the snowflake method of outlining. It's good, but time consuming and I've only got 2 weeks left, so this year it's Holly Lisle's notecard method . It looks fun. You basically write out ideas of scenes on index cards and kind of trust your brain to tie them together in a coherent plot. This seems good for me this year because at the moment all I've got are ideas for scenes, so I hope my brain works as well as Holly's, plus it gives me a good excuse to use up those coloured index cards I bought for my 2006 NaNo that never got planned.

So far it's going pretty well. I've plotted out most of Act I using this method so I've got at least the first couple of chapters. I managed to do this in about an hour yesterday, but I did have a better idea of the first part so we'll see how the rest goes. I'm going to start on Act II now. Wish me luck! I'm going to need it.

At least if it fails I've got Blue Blood ready to fall back on :)

2 month, 4 days and counting....

That's how long there is until NaNoWriMo. Possibly a little bit too soon to start planning, you may think, but it's not that long considering I'm also supposed to be making our wedding scrapbook, learning to draw manga, actually getting round to finishing one of the Guildwars games, and picking up a book on biological psychology at some point in prep for my uni course next year. So now seems like the perfect time to start planning.

This year my shamelessly tacky archetypal fantasy adventure is called "Cold Spell", so it's oddly appropriate that I'm trying out the Snowflake Method to plan it. This method is the creation of Randy Ingermanson (aka "The Snowflake Guy"), and the idea is that you start with one sentence and build outwards until you've got a full detailed plan. I don't know how effective it is. That's what we're here to find out!

With this method you should already have mused a bit on your novel idea and have a pretty good idea of the general direction you're going with it. I'm approaching this from a position of having written out a fairly detailed mythology for the world, an idea of the first scene and the climactic scene (and a couple of vague ideas for currently unplaced events in-between), and a paragraph about each of the four main characters (including the villain).

Step 1: summarise the story in a sentence

This has been the hardest bit so far. I've always struggled with this concept. One sentence to express the substance of your whole book. Heck, if I could say it in a sentence I wouldn't need to write a whole book, would I!? My problem with doing this is that I like to have multiple focus characters, so one sentence doesn't quite do it for me, but I had to pick one and dutifully sticking to the recommended 15 word limit I came up with: "A con-artist unwittingly targets a fated amnesiac prince for her latest money making scheme." Nope, that really doesn't capture the essence of my book. It doesn't mention the spirits or monsters or magic or anything, though it is kind of the seed of the idea I started with so perhaps it's an appropriate point to build from. It'll do for now. Not loving step 1 though.

Step 2: summarise the story in a paragraph

This was less painful, though I deviated ever so slightly from the advice. Randy recommends 5 sentences, 3 of which should be a "disaster" or a turning point in the story. I didn't feel very prepared for this step as I couldn't think of 3 disasters, so instead of doing a paragraph I just wrote out "disaster 1, disaster 2, disaster 3" and sat down for a think. Disaster 3 was easy enough, final confrontation, yadda yadda yadda. Disaster 1 became the first confrontation (though I'm not sure it's disastrous enough to qualify), and disaster 2, well, I managed to think of something that actually ties in nicely, so this step has paid off so far. I've got 3 solid events in a defined order, and though some of them may not end up as official 'end of act disasters' we're starting to see a bit of structure here, which is the point of the exercise.

Step 3: character summary sheets

As an RPG groupie I usually have a different idea of character sheets, but this step has been really useful. Definitely the best step for me so far. The idea is to write a sheet for each character with the following info:

Quote

R. Ingermason, 'How to write a novel: the snowflake method'

I'd already started doing something like this when editing to make sure that each individual character has a coherent storyline on their own. As I said, I like to have quite a few focus characters so doing something like this is so valuable. I found it especially useful to do the story outline for my villain. I quickly realised that she was seriously lacking in anything to do but fail to catch one prince for the whole book, so thank goodness I caught that now and was able to devise some more substantial challenges for her. It would have been a nightmare if I noticed after writing the book. He is the hero, but he's not THAT hard to catch! Definitely a worthwhile stage.

Well, that's as far as I've got for now. I've got another 2 characters to do with step 3, then it's on to step 4!

Well, this is supposed to be a vaguely writerish blog, and as of yet I haven't done any vaguely writeresque posts. Well, there's a reason for that. I've been too busy writing! Well, sort of. I'm currently going through one of those rare periods of uber-motivation, where I want to work on everything all at once, and the even rarer phenomenon of inspiration overload, meaning that I have to carry around 2 different notebooks, keep my electronic files for 3 different books up to date on my googledocs, and my poor little pink filofax is covered in notes on other things that are just going to have to wait.

But, lucky for me, help is at hand. Something is coming along that will focus my attention on one project and utterly take over my life for a couple of months. If you look down at the bottom of the page you'll see a little ticker widget counting down. "What's it counting down to?" I hear you cry (except for that that one guy at the back asking if I've got any beer on this blog). Well, I'm glad you asked (about the ticker, not you, beer guy. No beer for you). It's counting down to that most sacred of annual events, NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated. It's a wonderful time when anyone who wants to write a novel, whether they're a seasoned pro, a hopeful amateur, or a mild mannered janitor with a super secret crime fighting alter-ego who just fancies having a go, can! What makes NaNo different from doing it any other month of the year is you get to do it with a whole bunch of other people who want to do the same thing, and they do come up with some very entertaining stuff.

The challenge: Write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

50,000 words is quite a hefty chunk of writing, and there are a couple of common ways that people approach the beast. I think most people start out armed with only a trusty idea, usually of who their hero is and what they expect said hero to do for the next month to earn their keep, and charge ahead on November 1st. This seems to appeal to a lot of NaNoers because 1) it doesn't involve much planning past the initial idea and some day dreaming so you can just build up your enthusiasm in preparation for the big day and totally throw yourself into the project virtually from scratch at the start of the month, and 2) because it's not rigorously structured, so there are lots of surprises and room for spontaneous creatively. They're not really sure where it's going, so there's always a chance that your hero is minding his own business, chatting up the local milkmaid, when in a sudden fit of desperation to meet your daily word goal he gets whisked away by busty vampire ninja pirates. Big fun all round really. If you're new to NaNo, or feel like plans are evil things that suck all the fun and spontaneity out of your writing then this is the method for you! Alas, it's not the method for me, as last year's failed attempt will testify.

This leads me on to 50K words tackling tactic number 2. Plan plan plan. The downside of tactic number 1 is actually one of it's upsides too. You don't really have a plan. You don't know where it's going, and although this does leave a whole world of randomly entertaining hi-jinks open to you, it also carries the danger of you quickly running out of steam as you realise you haven't figured out enough of the backstory to have the first 5000 words make any sense, but it wouldn't matter if you had done because somehow your hero got kidnapped on the first page and you've been waffling on about a monkey on a motorbike to keep your word count up while you think about how to get him back. Nope, for me, planning is the way. And with 2 months, 1 week, blah blah blah to go, and me being a colossal nerpie, of course I have already started. And I'm feeling pretty good about it. I have a couple of characters, something for them to do, a bad guy, and about 600 words of creation story/ancient mythology. Not entirely sure how that happened but I'm about to make a whole race extinct before the book even starts. Who says planning is boring? Anyway, during this run up to NaNo I shall also be doing a little experiment. I'm going to try planning using the Snowflake Technique, and I'll try and record some of my thoughts about it as I go along. So, tune in next time if you're interested in how I'm getting along, or if you want to see if I've killed off any more races.