This year, I thought it was about time to tackle NaNoWriMo again. I did it a looooong time ago, so long that I don’t even think my story is on the site any more.
What is NaNoWriMo?! That’s a weird word…
Yeah, it definitely is. It stands for “National Novel Writing Month,” and it takes place during the month of November.
The idea is just that – write a novel in 30 days.
50,000 words.
That means you have to write more than 1,500 words a day for 30 days to complete it.
Crazy, right?
Well, truthfully, it’s not as bad as you would think. When I did it ages ago, I had only an idea for a world and a few characters in my head, and just… wrote. I explored the world and built it as I went. It was difficult, true, but here’s the kicker.
Don’t edit. Just write.
That makes it a billion times easier, IMO. You are just writing. To write.
I know I wrote the same scene like a dozen times, only moving forward slightly each time. I had no real plan, and that’s okay. However you approach NaNo is the right way, so long as you write. And write. And write.
So you’re saying you are going to just make up a story as you go?
That’s one way of doing it. This time, however, I want to work on a story I started a long time ago, that I am kind of attached to. I’m spending this month building a world I can work within, and kind of creating standards for how certain things work, like my magic system.
Yeah, that’s right. High fantasy all the way.
The world is building itself as I think about it, and it’s really interesting to see something I’ve had in my head, and scenes and snippets I had written ages ago (living on my other laptop that I can’t find a power cord for, so I can’t actually get at them just yet), come together. Plus, when I originally started writing this character’s story, it was just a few scenes and the like, no idea where it was going or what the actual goal was.
Now I have an end point.
Getting the characters to that point is gonna be a challenge, though. So this year, I’m really heavily relying on index cards, and scrivener, to try to keep me on track.
This is all stuff I’ve either written before, probably a decade ago, or have run through in my head. I’m hoping that by starting with something I can see in my mind, when I get to the parts that I don’t know, it’ll flow easier.
As you can see, I’m planning out whatever I can. I also have a notebook with like a million character names scribbled in it, that I’m using as a kind of pool to pull names from.
Naming is one of the hardest things for me to do. When I was originally writing this, I used Celtic/Gaelic names, as I love how they sound. Which got really hard really fast. Like, naming places and minor characters within the same family of names was terrible. To not make them all sound too similar, I had to move to other British Isles languages, like Scots Gaelic and Welsh. Which really sounds like just mashing a keyboard, and made keeping track of people really, really hard.
When your names are harder to read and slow down the story, that’s a problem.
So this time, I stuck to working with French, Anglo and Germanic names for most characters. A few places and characters from far away needed Russian/Serbian/Slavic names, but the fact that they stand out is the point. Viliam and Nadeja, for example.
City and country names, I think, can be sillier, since the countries are older and have probably gone through linguistic shifts as they change hands and rulers.
Anyways, rambling aside, I like to keep collections of names and place names. When I am writing, however, I like to just use placeholders – hence (evil organization) of families as a card. I mean, that’s not their name, although it would be quite hilarious if it was. But I can’t think of anything yet, so placeholder it is! Thank goodness for the ability to search and replace, otherwise there would be so many (bad Templar) and (main character) and (capital city) and (magic school) in my story it’s not even funny.
So, NaNoWriMo. You now know what it is! I recommend giving it a go, even if you go in blind! Why not? What do you have to lose? No one reads your story (it’s just submitted to do a word count only and make sure you’re not copy/pasting the same thing over and over again), so nothing to be embarrassed about. And look at this blog entry – it is half of the words I’d have to write in a day!
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