Oct 252017
Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month.
(For those of you unfamiliar with it, NaNoWriMo refers to National Novel Writing Month, where people attempt to write at least 50,000 words in the month of November.)
I’ve been officially doing NaNoWriMo since 2009, when I wrote the first draft of Agent of the Relari.
Some years, I go into it with a strong idea of my story and characters, filled with excitement to get writing. These years go very well for me, like in 2014 when I wrote 94,000 words of The Nightbringer and last year when I wrote 78,000 words of The Time of Adversity (then using the working title Unto Dust).
Some years, I go in with barely any ideas, which is what happened in 2015, when I squeaked out 50,000 words of Elven Ascendant and haven’t touched it since.
In contrast, I spent the past months editing both The Nightbringer and The Time of Adversity and like those stories quite a bit.
This year, I feel as though I’m somewhere in between. I didn’t have any solid ideas for a long time, but now I think I’m going to write another YA fantasy novel. A few characters have begun to form in my mind, and that’s the most important part for me to start writing.
My plot ideas… are shaky. They keep changing. This definitely isn’t a 2014 or 2016 NaNoWriMo where I’ll go into it knowing the general course the story should take. Still, I feel I’m at least a little more prepared than I was in 2015.
What about you? If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, do you already know what you want to write?