NaNoWriNo

Because I start my new day job on Monday, after six months without one, November will be the first month in a while in which I don’t write 50,000 words.

Lots of people are gearing up for NaNoWriMo, though, so I thought I’d pass on some things I’ve learned in the hope they’ll be useful to someone. These are not The Rules Which Thou Shalt Follow; they’re things that work for me to produce a decent draft quickly, and they may also work for you. Or not.

1. I get an idea for a story, usually one or more characters in a situation or a cool setting idea, and write it down.

1.5. Sometimes, I write down a list of things I want to include in the story – character arcs, plot arcs, Moments of Awesome, setting stuff, whatever excites me. I sometimes also combine several ideas that seem similar. For example, I had an idea for a thief who can “conjure” things through a portal in his hand, into the temple of the Trickster God; and an idea in which the temple of Wisdom is a library with ponderous mottoes over the doors. Both of those had temples, so I thought they might be in the same story. They were. (Hand of the Trickster.)

2. I expand the story idea into what I think of as a “narrative outline”: a plot summary, in order, of what happens in the book. It may be fairly sketchy and minimal, at first, but it’s a complete story that makes sense. Unless it uses characters that I’ve already written about, I don’t use character names in this, just roles. (Making up the names would slow me down, and using the roles instead makes it clearer what the character interactions are.)

3. I break it up into paragraphs. These roughly correspond to chapter breaks. I copy and paste these into Scrivener as notecards.

All of this gives me a sense of direction, without being so detailed that I feel I’ve written the story already and the fun bit is over.

4. I make sure that the characters want something and are competent to get it, but will have to struggle to do so. This is important, and will mean that I don’t have to drive them to do things; they’ll create the momentum for themselves.

5. I open the first chapter and add a scene. In the scene synopsis, I jot down whose point of view it’s in, what they want, and what changes by the end of the scene. Sometimes I do this in the form of a mini narrative outline.

5. I start writing the scene. When it’s over, I start writing the next one. I make sure to do the scene synopsis for each one before I start it (I learned this technique from +Rachel Aaron’s book 2k to 10k). That keeps me from wandering aimlessly.

Sometimes, I write a bunch of scene synopses in a row, either as a break from writing the actual prose or because I want to work out where I’m going. All of this process is flexible, and it’s changing all the time; I do what helps me, and I keep learning.

If extra scenes occur to me, I add them on the fly. If I decide that a scene isn’t needed, or that it can be covered in a couple of lines of dialog, I cut it. If my original scene synopsis needs to be changed, I change it.

I don’t follow the scene synopsis rigidly; it’s a way to get started. Often, the scene turns out differently once I get the characters interacting.

Sometimes, if I particularly want to write certain scenes that aren’t the next ones, I’ll skip ahead and do so. It adds complexity over doing all the scenes in order, but it also makes it easier to motivate myself.

6. I make up names as I go and note them in the Research section in Scrivener. Because I’m mostly working in Scrivener for iOS, which is slower to navigate around, if I forget a name I don’t go and look it up; I leave a placeholder in square brackets, like [lt1], and go back later and put the actual name in. Likewise placenames and such. I have two countries in my current WIP based on England and France, and I sometimes just put [English] or [French] in the text to save me looking up what I called them. This maintains the momentum.

You can do the same with facts, rather than go off and research and break your momentum.

7. I try to finish each scene at a significant moment that will make the reader want to keep reading.

8. I don’t worry too much about chapters at first. Later on, I assemble scenes into roughly equal-sized chapters. My chapters are about 3500-6000 words, about the same length as a short story, but there’s no particular rule. I just like to work in units of that length.

9. When I’ve written a complete, coherent story, I go through it and fix up continuity, since I’ve usually changed my mind on things partway through, and come up with better ideas later on that now need to be foreshadowed. I make sure I replace all the square-bracket stuff, that I’ve spelled character names consistently, and so forth.

I now have something that could work as a novel, even though it isn’t yet as good as it could be.

10. I do a revision pass, typically deepening point of view, adding sensory detail and description, and adding more internal reflection and emotion to the character. I add bits of backstory that show why the character’s arc matters, and why they care so much. (Increasingly, I do this as I go rather than in revision, but that’s because I’m always learning from what I had to work hard on in the previous book.)

11. I show it to beta readers and get their feedback, then to my development editor likewise. I incorporate what makes sense to me.

12. I get S. A. Hunt to make me a cover, because he’s awesome.

13. I tidy everything up, do a last check for continuity (because, often, changing something in one paragraph will affect another paragraph somewhere else), and compile it in the final version. To the Bat-Amazon!