NaNoWriMo 2011

I was fifteen or sixteen when I wrote my first NaNoWriMo. A friend from a parenting forum my mother frequented at the time told her about it, encouraging her to try it out and my mother passed the information along to me, in a half-bewildered, half-impressed, "it sounds unbelievably stressful, but could be fun!" sort of way.

It was unbelievably stressful. It was unbelievably fun.
I sat down on November 1st with absolutely no story idea in my head. None. I was going through a creative dry patch at the time, and had hoped that the prompt of "50k/30days" would jump start my brain back to its usual 24/7 imagination loop. I stared at the blank Word Document for upwards of 20 minutes, with the increasing sense that the damn thing was mocking me. To shut it up, I wrote a word:

Prologue.

"Aha!" I said to myself. "Already this will be a proper, grown-up novel--it has a PROLOGUE!"

Of course, nothing came after "Prologue" for another half hour, and I began to despair. I went to eat dinner, did some homework, came back and put my laptop on my lap, but "Prologue" had not done what I wanted and reproduced words on its own in my absence. I fumed for a moment, and then put my hands to the keyboard again. If I could not make a story come to me, I would just start building scenery until something inspired me. This has always been one of my favorite writing tricks, writing lush, detailed scenes that may or may not ever find their way into a story. It forces my brain to think about aesthetics for a moment, rather than just pace and plot and dialogue. For someone whose work has always been heavily dialogue- and action-oriented, this has been a very useful exercise.

It was useful this time, too, and from a carefully detailed scene of a winter forest under falling snow, my "Prologue" turned into a proper prologue and I think I even got through Chapter One that night, too.

To make a long story short, I finished NaNoWriMo that year, and have been participating ever since. Most years, I clear the 50k mark on or before the 30th. Twice, I've cleared 50k, but the story was not finished (they are both sitting in a folder on my computer, each around 75k, STILL. NOT. FINISHED.) and only once I had to give up around 30k because I was studying abroad at the time and doing ten bajillion other things. And also, that particular story sucked. Well, the idea itself did not suck, but my writing was sucking immensely, mostly due to a lack of time and dedication to the task.

Which brings us to this year's NaNoWriMo. I have picked up the idea from that aborted year mentioned above, and I think I am going to try it again. Of course, not with the original manuscript (which I should probably ritually burn, holy hell is it a mess) but with the concept to start a completely new story. One with a proper plot this time. And proper characters.

With each new NaNo comes new challenges, some surmountable, others not so much. Last year, I reached my 50k goal (though that was one of the 2 WIP's that did not 'end' at 50k) despite working almost full time. This year, I am working a bit less, but I am also going to graduate school full time, and doing a lot of work for the university paper outside of school. Which means one of two possible outcomes:

1. I will become an even greater master of time management and successfully pull off a straight A quarter, get a promotion/raise at work, and write the next Great American Novel

or

2. I will explode

So, who else is doing NaNoWriMo? Do you have your ideas ironed out yet? How are you preparing? I am interested to hear who else is going to give up their November to the unbelievably stressful/unbelievably fun craft of writing under pressure!

~Katherine