What is NaNoWriMo? National Novel Writing Month, an exercise in brain dumping and word vomiting and silencing your inner editor for an entire 30 days with the intent of writing a rough draft of a novel in a month. (For more information and to participate, you can find the Young Writers Program here and the more challenging NaNoWriMo site here.)
I have participated in National Novel Writing Month for a few years now--my first time led to my now completed novel. So in an effort to help other young writers trying to get through NaNoWriMo, or who don't want the pressure of writing a novel in a month and simply want tips for getting through that rough draft, I will be posting a NaNoWriMo survival tip each week during this November.
Here is the first.
Survival Tip #1: Pick a plan that works for you, and stick to it.
You may be going into this NaNoWriMo with a solid outline, written on paper or planned in your head. You might now exactly what is going to happen in your novel. Or you might have a basic idea, but no real plan of attack (me). Or maybe you just have the name of a character; that's cool too. Whatever your state of mind as you start this month, my first bit of advice is to take fifteen minutes to figure out how you are going to write.
What I mean by this is, in what way will you actually put the words down on paper? Not so much pen-and-paper or computer, but the order of scenes and content. I've approached this in two different ways before.
Version 1:
Consider the writing of your novel as a journey from point A to point B. In the case of my visual aid, point A (the first words of your novel) is the town of Eureka, CA, and point B ("The End") is Boston, MA.
There are different paths you can go down to get to your destination, but you still go directly from point A to point B, hitting each point in between chronologically. This is forcing yourself to write the entire novel from beginning to ending, without jumping around to a point in the middle before you finish the beginning.
Version 2:
You're still going from Eureka to Boston, but the path is a little more... jumpy.
Point B may be chronological in accordance to point A, but point C is all the way in New York City, at the end of the book. Then you go back to point D in Colorado Springs, follow the path to point E in Kansas City, then jump over to D.C. for point F, back a ways to point G in Lexington, and finally to point H in Boston. And this could be changed even more. Maybe you decide that you don't want to visit Boston last, and it becomes point D, or even point A. And point A could become point H.
While this may seem like a rather confusing way of putting things, it can actually be a decent way of writing a novel. All it means is that instead of writing the entire story chronologically, you bounce from scene to scene, writing what is interesting or that you have a clear plan for, and then figuring out the chapters in between later on. Maybe you write the last chapter first, or your first chapter last. It's up to you.There are pros and cons to each version, of course. In terms of the pros, in Version 1, by forcing yourself not to jump to the chapters that are more interesting, you have to write the in between scenes. This can up productivity, because now you are trying to get to a specific goal. We all have to drive through some wheat fields before getting to the cities, and the allure of the city is enough to get you through that wheat field. However, in Version 2, you provide yourself with a framework of really good scenes that now just need some stitching together. It ends up a bit like a patchwork quilt at first, but as you edit it starts to all blend together. This can also increase your word count, as you might be writing those exciting scenes quicker and getting carried away in your plot, and before you know it you've hit 50,000 words.
There are issues to both, too. It can be easy to stall out in Version 1, because even though you know that that great big exciting city is just off in the distance, the wheat field seems like it's going on forever. You sometimes what to skip ahead to that scene which has been brewing in your head, but you first have to get through this one scene that has been giving you problems, or the one problem that you can't quite figure out. In Version 2, the issues come more from an editing and plot standpoint. If you write a scene too far ahead in the plotline, and then realize after writing an earlier scene that nothing in the first one you wrote is valid anymore, you now have to rewrite the entire scene. Granted, that would more likely be something done after NaNoWriMo is finished, when you're actually in the editing stage, but it can still be a frustrating problem to try and sort out.
The biggest thing you should take away from this is to figure out what works for you, and do your best to keep with it for the entire month. Of course, if you realize a week in that Version 1 just isn't working, switch to Version 2, or whatever other way of writing makes the most sense to you. But if you know that what you are doing is going to work, try to stick with it and reach that ending!
Happy NaNoWriMo, and good luck to all participants!
(Image credits: www.bing.com/maps)
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