This is my first NaNoWriMo. At the beginning of the month, I began planning for my first novel. At the beginning of next month, I will begin writing it.
This is a big step for me. Up until now, I’ve never even attempted anything more than novella length. And most of those attempts fell short, and ended up being on the longer end of short story length.
To keep myself writing when NaNoWriMo starts, and to ensure that the story doesn’t derail, I’ve been planning. Plotting. My planning process seems to be something between the super fast style of the pulp fiction of old, inspired mainly by the writing advice of Michael Moorcock, and the much more detailed and complex style of the snowflake method. Twelve pages of planning, notes, ideas, seven of which are purely an outline.
And I’m not done yet. I have two more weeks to work on planning, and I intend to use those two weeks to my advantage. When November starts, I will be ready. Despite the fact that the second half of the month is bisected by both a holiday and the busiest time of the year for my job, I am going to win the NaNoWriMo competition. And I am going to try my damnedest to actually finish the novel itself, since the contest only requires 50,000 words, and my novel will probably be somewhere in the realm of 80,000 or more.
The practice runs I’ve been doing with the fan fiction I’ve been writing have proven that I’m capable of hammering out 4000 words a day easily, as long as I know what I’m writing and I don’t have to stop and figure it out every few minutes. Which means that the planning I’m doing should be enough to provide fuel for the fire.
And if I can finish the novel in November and edit it by the end of December, I very well may decide not to bother with a New Year’s Resolution this coming year. Because I’ll already have a novel ready to submit to agents.
