Happy NaNoWriMo Prep Month!
And a whole host of other things that inspire readers and writers alike--I'm looking at you, pumpkin-scented candles.
(I will preface this post by saying I won’t be participating in NaNoWriMo this year—I have school and a half-formed project to occupy my time—but as a staunch planner, October is a crucial month should November choose to wink its mischievous eye at me.)
Yesterday was the first day of October—ah, how the time whittles itself away!—which means we’re officially in the second most important month of the year. That’s right, writers; it’s the month before the famed NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month for those who don’t torture themselves with the arduous task of completing a 50k-word novel in one month).
“But what does the month before NaNoWriMo have to do with anything?” you may ask. “It doesn’t matter until it’s actually November, right?”
For some people, yeah sure, hold off writing your novel before the beginning of November. It’s okay to start with just an idea and let the words guide you through the story. Plenty of authors do this, and a lot of them do it well. All the more power to you if you can sit down and carve nothing into something. Or rather, preserve a nebulous, tenuous thing and grow it into something tangible, into something that can live and breathe and walk on its own.
But for me, and many others, the real writing starts with the pre-writing. And the pre-writing, well, it takes time. Sometimes more time than the month of October allows.
When I started ghostwriting contemporary romance, I was given an outline template, which encompassed everything that happened in each chapter with elaborate character sketches, quirks, nicknames, and more. I would often end up with a fifty page outline from my clients, but despite this rigorous planning (or maybe because of it), I was left feeling uncertain of what the story was about or how it was supposed to feel.
What is the core of a story? Argue and argue about the different types of literature and the multitudes of what those stories could contain, but I’d argue that every story, every epic tale, comes from a basic question:
What if X happened to someone?
X is something bad. X is something good. X is something, and that something gets the ink wet.
What if a wolf ate that little girl’s grandma?
What if an ogre falls in love with a princess?
What if a god wakes up in a human’s body?
What if, what if, what if. What a beautiful question, what if! This question may be all the pre-writing that an author needs. It’s a fundamental starting point and a point I come back to when I feel like I’m losing myself in the minutiae of characters and setting and scene.
It all does come back to that “what if” question, and that question can lead to a robust outline. And, despite popular belief, a robust outline doesn’t have to mean an in-depth character-sketch, including their favorite foods, their birthdays, and who their childhood crush was.
In my mind, a robust outline needs to contain two things—where the characters (or situation, or animals, or whatever) start and where they end. This doesn’t mean the beginning and ending of the book (though it certainly could be!). It could be where a chapter starts and ends, a scene, maybe even a half-page interaction—though I’m not sure about the utility of that last one.
All I’m trying to say is knowing where you’re starting and where you’re going is integral. How you get there is where the fun and creativity comes in. Who knows? Maybe by the time you get to the end, through all the creativity and exploration you’ve endured, you’ll reach a completely different ending than you originally envisioned.
Phew. Did that make any sense? You tell me.
Thanks for sharing your insight about good writing .It has been helpful to see the creative mind at work.
I’m getting some of my poetry out there... It makes me happy.
Love, Sheila