NaNoWriMo Journal

NaNoWriMo 30: Why I Love NaNoWriMo

I'm what you call a pantser. That means I write by the seat of my pants. I feel the story, and it flows that way. Characters have minds of their own, and even as I am crafting the story, I feel like a spectator, as the characters carry it forward.

That makes for exciting writing in the moment, and it feels natural to read. The problem is that because I don't know where the story is going at any given moment, it tends to be haphazard. So there are very good moments, mixed in with ramblings and diversions which were interesting to write, but don't actually have anything to do with the story.

Enter National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The idea is to write an entire novel in the month of November. I did it for the first time in 2014, producing The First Jumper: Little Bear, which is now on Amazon. I didn't quite finish it in November, but managed over 70,000 words in that month. The unchanged first draft is on Wattpad, along with this journal which I wrote at the same time.

What happened in that book was that because I could not start actually writing the novel until November 1, i spent the weeks prior to that novel doing something I had never done before. I planned a book out before I started writing it. When I sat down on that first morning, I had a full scene list, a story synopsis, and even some character sheets.

I wasn't sure it would work. I wondered if the planning would kill the flow, and I worried that the story would be stilted. I was wrong.

The writing itself was just as much seat-of-the-pants as before, but within the constraints of what I planned. The result was a much better story than I had written before.

For 2015, I am again planning a novel. Because I know how it works, now, I am channeling all that frustrated eagerness to get started on it into planning the novel out. It is now October 18, and I have written out most of my full character sheets, and I am expanding the synopsis. (In the snowflake method, it is step four.)

The story has already grown far beyond what I thought it would be. From a rough but clever concept with a powerful human story line, it has grown into what is either going to be a very long novel with four parts, or (more likely) a tetralogy. Each of the major characters has a powerful story, large struggles, and both victories and defeats. Each story demands to be told, so they are going to be told separately, instead of confusing the reader by trying to load them all into one story, or telling one story and denying the others.

This is a time travel story, so it is very complex. I believe I am going to tell it in a way that may not have been done before. I've never seen it, anyway. I hope you like it. Four characters travel through time. Each one has a profound impact on the same period. These are their stories. There are some events which overlap, but not much, because the time stream changes with each character's transition through time. 

My day job is as a computer programmer. I like figuring out how things can make sense, and working out the details. That's part of the fun, for me. So I've been working out what happens to the time stream every time someone time travels.

Honestly, I don't think I could write this by the seat of my pants. I'm itching to get started. I even have the first paragraph written out in my head for all four of the character stories, and I know how they all will end. In the meantime, I'm reining in my desire to write and channeling that into planning out the store more and more and more.

We'll see how it turns out.