How to Write a Novel and NaNoWri Mo
December
23
NaNoWriMo Winner
Having more or less recovered from the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I’m always interested in articles about writing. Jennifer Jensen, writing for suite101.com posted Plan Your Novel Writing with the Snowflake Method, in which she outlines a 10 step procedure for outlining and planning a novel. I didn’t do that.
The method looks so logical. Start with a simple one sentence summary of the story. Expand on that in a step-by-step manner until characters, chapter summaries, scenes and expand all of that into a miniature first draft of the novel. At that point, Jensen maintains that the first draft is “already half written. I followed a similar procedure in preparing for NaNoWriMo.
To complete the NaNoWriMo requirements, or “win”, I needed to write 50,000 original words in the month of November. I had a novel outlined. Honestly, I did. By day 4 of the month I’d already veered from that outline. By the end of the first week I had seriously left my outlined course trajectory. To finish the 50K words in 30 days I needed to average 1667 each day. There may be writers for whom that is not a challenge. I’m not one of them.
After taking the first week of December to recover, I’m back at the project and nearing 64,000 words. Obviously, my pace has dropped from the frantic NaNoWriMo inspired one. Also obviously, this draft looks little like my planned one.
The high pace of NaNoWriMo doesn’t leave a lot of room for wrestling with a plot that runs off in a direction different from the one so carefully outlined. And, that’s just fine. I’m sure that the story will benefit from the outline and character summaries I’d worked on earlier in the late summer and fall. And it’s alright that my process became so tangential.
When the muse takes over the planning part of my brain has to step aside. That’s good to know about my writing. I have a wonderful 28 page outline for a novel and almost 300 pages of the first draft. They don’t have a lot in common other than mostly the same characters. It has been an interesting experience, though.
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I think the real value in having planned the novel in the first place, is that it allows the subconscious mind to _continue_ working on the story as you write, making it better than it would have originally been. That’s awesome that you made it through the month and hit your goal!
Have you seen the course at http://zero2novel.com? It gives you a great way to plan your story and lots of other tips that could help you through NaNoWriMo.