I love NaNoWriMo. There is something about writing 50,000 words in one gigantic mass of creativity that really appeals to me.
The idea of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is to write 50,000 words in the month of November. That's approximately 1,667 words a day. You can plan and outline as much as you want before November, but you can't count any words written beforehand toward your total.
From past experience, I knew that I have trouble writing without an outline, so once I had my world and my main character it was time to get started figuring out what would actually happen in my story. As you know from my previous posts, I still write a lot by hand in notebooks, especially to plan and to brainstorm.
I wrote several synopses of the plot, constantly asking what ifs, refining and developing the story. In June 2010, driving home from Ocean City, Maryland I had two epiphanies that changed what I had been thinking before. One had to do with Dakota's motivation and the other connected a secondary character more closely with the main plot. I continued to summarize and question and come up with ideas to make the story better.
During the summer I also started writing voice experiments. I couldn't actually write the story (not and adhere to NaNoWriMo's honor system), but I could experiment with the narration from Dakota's POV as long as I started from scratch with those moments when November came around. It was during these voice experiments that I came up with a particular plot element and a character associated with it who has become one of my favorites. I'm not sure either of these would have come up if I had just started writing and not given myself the time (in preparation for NaNoWriMo) to take my time figuring out what was going to happen and to experiment in this way.
I was also using Scrivener during this time to visually plot out my scenes. Scrivener is an amazingly flexible tools for writers of all stripes who want to be able to plot, outline, write, organize, edit and collect research in one program. You can tailor it to fit your particular needs. Dakotashi, however, would be the first time that I planned and wrote a novel from scratch using Scrivener.
Scirivener has an awesome feature called the cork board that mimics the classic plotting technique of using index cards to detail scenes and move them around. It's a lot easier on Scrivener, trust me! However, at the beginning of a project when my idea is still tumbling around in my mind collecting subconscious detritus and gaining mass, I still like writing in my notebooks--I haven't really started thinking of something as specific as a scene yet. However as NaNoWriMo grew closer, my scene ideas grew more detailed and found their way onto Scrivener where I could easily edit and move them around.
Scrivener became even more useful to me during revision, but there were two tools that were immensely useful to me even while writing my first draft. Scrivener allows you to use color-coded "pins" with your index cards and also to "stamp" them. For one of my earlier books I use the pins to show POV. For this book, with only one POV, I didn't need to do that, so I decided to use the colors to indicate what plot thread and/or theme each particular theme was related to. Since the story takes place in a concentrated period of time, I used the stamps to show what day of the story it takes place. At a glance, I could see how many scenes were taking place during a day and what plot thread they were related to.
NaNoWriMo went smoothly and I got to a point in the story that is still approximately the half way point today. After writing the first half, I think I worked on something else for awhile. Before NaNoWriMo 2011, I realized that I did not have a good enough handle on my villain so I spent more time working out exactly what was happening with him, even adding index cards for his actions, even though he would never have scenes written for him. Since there is a large mystery element to the story and I'd never written a mystery before, I also looked at all the clues that Dakota would find and what he would know when.
During this second NaNoWriMo I decided that it took too long to retype things into my computer so I didn't do as much writing by hand. I also ventured out to write-ins for the first time and found them enormously productive. I still had 4,500 words to go on the last day, but I made it to 50k. I was really close to end of the story at that point and knowing myself, I might have pushed through to THE END as well, but I don't remember for sure. Altogether, I wrote 104,000 words.
In Part III of this series, I'll talk about my revision process.
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