NaNoWriMo 2010 and Current Work

This is a long one, so bear with me.

What is NaNoWriMo 2010? It is a contest. Sort of. It stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to, from November 1st to November 31st, write 50,000 words. Let me spell that out for you. Fifty. Thousand. Words. That's over 1000 a day. Every day. For a month. The Prize? There is no prize. Except for the fact that YOU WROTE A NOVEL. Here's the official website

I tried last year, failing miserably with a paltry 2481 words. I thought I could pull it off by writing off of this idea I had, just making it all up as I went along, following a premise that I hadn't fully worked out yet. It was awful. I made up characters on the fly and I only had a vague outline to work with. On top of that, my outline included a plot line I had not even attempted to flesh out. Needless to say, It was a train wreck of amateurishness. Defeated by my own style of "make it up as you go," I shelved the idea, wanting to get back to it after writing other things.



Earlier this month, I began planning my novel for this year. It was a purposely generic fantasy adventure with one cynical character who questioned everything around him ("I'll bet the evil cult leader is bald with a black goatee. And yup. That's exactly what he looks like"). I was having fun setting up a bunch of little episodes, wanting to do it like an old pulp anthology from back in the day. But it wore on me. I felt like a hack, just putting a twist on fantasy stories which has been done to death, honestly. Almost everything I had was already done by much better writers. Giant, muscled meat-head of a hero who is clueless and doesn't fear anything? Done before. Cynical partner of the Hero who questions everything? Done to death.

Why did this bother me so? There's one simple answer: In making my generic fantasy that riffed on fantasy clichés, I had turned it into a self-defeating prophecy. It was already a generic cliché itself. By riffing on the genre, I had made my fantasy satire into a generic fantasy satire. My ideas have been done to death by others satirizing the genre. If I wanted to continue with this damn project, I'd have to be insanely more original with my characters. I need a twist to make it interesting. Discouraged, I shelved this project, too.


While messing with some novel-writing software, I decided to go back to my old story that I attempted last year and at least plug in the data from my brainstorming notebook into the program, so I'd have it on a computer. It wouldn't take me long, there was only really 4-6 pages of material that could be transferred over.


It took 6 hours. I put in my outline, and the program said it was too big. So I split it up into a few smaller parts. Then, I decided to elaborate on those parts a little better. Just basic stuff, nothing too big. But I began turning my tiny outline into a full-blown treatment. Just for fun, after I'd put in the first major event into its part, I added scene planning to it. I wound up with a ton of scenes. So I started thinking of the rest of the parts, and the scenes for them, and started expanding my treatment even more, adding more and more to it, until it became this monster project that I had wanted it to be. My enthusiasm is back up to where it was last year with this project, and I've decided that I will try it again this November.


It's funny. Throughout school, teachers always insisted on planning papers out with outlines and drafts and brainstorming. I still think this is a monster waste of time. But now that I'm doing it for my story, I'm seeing merits for it. I hit a huge wall with the treatment where it's becoming difficult to justify characters being in certain places for a particular reason. I've also noticed that I've almost completely forgotten that I have a main character in the second half of the story. Whoops. Both plotlines are good, but I was questioning when they overlapped. I had the main character just being scenery in another character's story, thinking that this was still the main character's story too. But he wasn't adding anything to the story at all. So, in doing this basic treatment draft, I discovered something that would have killed the entire story if I'd written it last year without it. I get almost a full month to break through the wall, thankfully.


I'll post previews as I make them. If anyone's interested, I'll post the original attempt before the contest starts (think of it as a bonus feature from a DVD).