Tomorrow marks the first day of NaNoWriMo. Am I ready?
I started snowflaking earlier in October, but the snowflaking hit rough roads about 2/3 of the way in as my character descriptions were turning into story summaries and my story summaries were ending up as character descriptions. I lost a bit of motivation on snowflaking when I should have kept it up, but I just have too many hobbies to pin myself down to it. Oh bother!
I have artwork up for all the story characters except for the main two (although I do have an artwork for Clover, while nothing for Sarah, and they’re the same character). Again, motivation fell after I “nearly completed” the character artworks.
This happens a lot, and I have many things over at The Pink Sylphide that I started, planned to do on a schedule, then forgot about or lost motivation with after repeatedly taking a long time to do each post in a series. I have so many drafts that are 75% to 90% finished.
November will be different.
How will it be different?
I hope it will be different.
Can it be different?
I want it to be different.
What would make it be different?
One of the reasons I feel NaNoWriMo will be a success for me (with “success” defined as “writing a rough draft of a novel in at least 50,000 words during the month of November) is because I’ll have about 17 days where I’ll be sitting in a vanpool for at least two hours a day with nothing but me and the laptop. I can’t do many other projects in this situation as I don’t have my bedroom full of resources, nor Internet access.
With time to write available, I’ll have to stock up on motivation. I’m motivated to write before I write, but when I write something, it isn’t always easy to move from Scene A to Scene F, knowing that Scenes B, C, D, and E needs to exist somehow. That, and I didn’t finish my snowflaking, so I don’t have a clear chapter-by-chapter idea of what will happen. If I don’t stock up on motivation, my writing ability will deflate early on.
The best way I can think of to keep motivation early on is to expect the worst. “Dream Clover” is planned to span three arcs.
The first arc will be fairly episodic, a one-story-per-chapter situation. This is where the main characters should be introduced, but there isn’t much room for anyone other than the two “main” main characters. Everything will be loose and there will be many story pieces that will either be dropped in the end or will get massive rewrites after November in order to give them a purpose in the overall story.
The second arc puts the characters into an actual story. There is a plot, and they find they are a part of it. Because they are now a part of this plot, they have no choice other than to play along. This arc ends where I know it will end. The plot has been resolved. This arc will need a lot of stretching out to fill in more depth to the story and characters. After November, of course.
The third and final arc looks at the characters now that the story is over. Shouldn’t this arc consist of nothing more than “…and they all lived happily ever after,” the end? Just because the plot seems to be resolved doesn’t mean the characters are. This arc has no real direction, and might end up going nowhere during November.
