November: 30 Days of Writing Bliss

Well, I'm supposed to be posting the final exercise in my series of short story writing exercises today, and I was just sitting down to do that when a friend e-mailed with an important reminder:  It's October 27th, which means NaNoWriMo begins in just 5 days!

I posted about this a year ago, so instead of wasting time writing about it all over again I'll just copy, paste, and tweak my post from last year, and that way while you're checking it out to see what all the November fuss is about, I'll slip away to finish up Part VIII of the short story posts.  Meet you back here in just a few days...

From October 2009:

I can't believe it's here again so soon!  If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) -- 30 caffeine-filled days of writing pleasure and frenzy in which participants write 1,667 words per day with the goal of completing a 50,000-word "shitty" first draft by midnight on November 30th.  Are you up for that? Are you ready to go??

There are so many ways to tackle this thing: 

l If you're a planner like me, you might prepare a detailed map either outlining or making lots of notes about every chapter and every scene, with a character chart delineating each character's growth and change throughout the entire novel -- a master plan so to speak, so you'll know where you're going and how you plan to get there.  My advice is to print out your plan and pin it to the wall next to your laptop.  That way you'll have it to refer to whenever you get stuck, which if you're like me will happen quite often. 

l  If you're like some of my successful NaNo friends, you begin on November 1st with nothing but the seed of an idea germinating in the soft tissue of your brain.  The idea here is to sit yourself down in front of your computer and imagine a character or two, listen to what they tell you, and hope that their words trickle down from your brain to your fingertips. If you're lucky, you'll end the month like my friends have, with something unwieldy, surprising, and magnificent -- a rough first draft to take you through the rest of the year and possibly beyond.  That's when you'll apply structure and plot to shape the story into something compelling and meaningful. 

Flannery O'Connor liked to work that way.  She once said: "If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don't have to know before you begin.  In fact, it may be better if you don't know what before you begin.  You ought to be able to discover something from your stories."

l  Of course you can always use a combination of these two methods.  Ansen Dibell, author of Plot, calls this writing method "Outlining from Inside":

"Stories -- especially live, convincing stories -- will change under your hands.  That's the reason I've never been persuaded of the usefulness of outlines.  By other writers' experience and my own, I judge that you generally won't know how a story's going to go until you get close to the place where something is just about to happen.  It will take its own shape and tell you how it wants to go, if you listen and watch attentively for the ways it's telling you. 

            "My advice is that you should always know what your next set-piece is going to be." [Dibell defines a set-piece as "a big scene the reader can see coming and can look forward to awhile, either in fear or in hope, before it's reached."] "You should be laying the groundwork for it right up to the time it happens.  You should start that groundwork either from the story's beginning, or lay down the first seeds back before the previous set-piece, to mature and bloom later."

            "When you've written your set-piece, you should be looking ahead to the end, to see if you can see its shape any more clearly from this vantage point than you could before.  And if you can, make adjustments to make this scene lead more clearly, more precisely, toward the last cliff, with fewer possible turnings-away, so that the story, crisis by crisis, narrows down to a point that seems inevitable when it comes. 

            "I call it outlining from inside.  Blocking out the story, one set-piece at a time, from inside it, taking due account of what it seems so far to be trying to become.  That much outlining, I believe, every writer needs if his story is not to appear a funhouse, a random series of events sprung on the reader for no particular reason, gone too fast to have impact, leading from nothing to nothing.  You need some kind of an outline, some idea of where you're going and how, if you're going to keep your story out of the funhouse which, in fiction, is no fun at all.  Look ahead at least to your next major scene and get ready for it.  Then deliver."

           

l   Another method I've heard about (but never tried myself) is the "Snowflake Method" developed by Randy Ingermanson, physicist and author, in which you begin by writing a one-sentence summary of your novel in 15 words or less. You turn this little snow-crystal into a snowflake (and finally, a snowball) by rolling it through the snow-fields of your mind where hopefully it picks up more and more ice-crystals during each pass.  By November 30th at midnight you should have a massive and intricate snowball full of well-developed characters, detailed settings, and compelling dialogue.  It goes something like this:

            1.  Write the summary sentence of your story in 15 words or less.

            2.  Expand this sentence into a 5-sentence paragraph: one sentence for the story setup, one sentence for each of three "disasters" that take place during your novel, ideally each disaster worse for the protagonist than the last.  The last sentence  tells the ending.

            3.  Expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a paragraph of it's own, fleshing out some of the disasters in your summary paragraph above.

            4.   Expand the one-page plot synopsis into a 4-page synopsis… etc., etc., etc.

You get the picture. Actually, it's much more detailed than that, and may be just what you need to organize your thoughts and turn them into a well-oiled page-turner.  You can get all the background information, and Randy Ingermanson's "Ten Steps of Design" at AdvancedFictionWriting.

Anyone who's ever NaNo'd successfully will tell you that every writer has a slightly different method of reaching that 50,000-word goal by the end of November.  All I can tell you is what worked for me.  

Here's just the thing to help get you started.  It's a great little exercise from John Dufresne's wonderfully encouraging book on writing fiction, The Lie That Tells A Truth.  (Might be a good one to read in preparation for November 1st…)  The exercise below will not only get you thinking about the beginning of your novel, but will come in handy whenever you're ready to begin that next big scene.

If you haven't already signed up for National Novel Writing Month, I urge you to do it now, before it's too late. You'll have the time of your life and you'll end up with a writing project to take you through 2011 and beyond :-)

Good luck!

An exercise from John Dufresne to get you started:

John Dufresne is professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, and author of The Lie That Tells A Truth, a Guide to Writing Fiction.  He has also authored four novels, and at least two short story collections that I know of.