Days 274-293 - National Novel Writing Month

Image from NaNoWriMo by hoosadork
(I didn't make that up), via Flickr.com

OK, so National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) isn't over yet for everyone, but I have decided I have learned enough and I need to get back to my regular project writing. I have missed the pleasure of writing about something new each day. There are still so many pieces I need to write down with so little time left within the 365 days of this project.

My NaNoWriMo project title is A Paper Doll World. I wrote the title and a very brief overview, but I never completed the summary. The same title just might be my project next year, too. I wrote about 30,000 words which will give me much to edit between now and next November.

As a transition, here are the lessons I learned from my 20 days with NaNoWriMo:

• It isn't necessary to have the whole idea for a story in order to get started, although perhaps I should wait until I have succeeded at writing the whole story to make that statement. A more accurate lesson is that it is possible to let inspiration take its course based on the characters already described.

• It isn't necessary to do all the research before beginning to write. As I thought of the places I could place my characters, I looked up reference material, but I didn't spend time reading it all. I just kept track of where I could get the material again and kept writing.

• It isn't necessary to be strict about chronology when beginning to write. I couldn't decide if I wanted to tell the story as it would have been during my childhood or as it would be now. Eventually it seemed clear that I needed to tell the story of my character as an adult with flashbacks to childhood. That made it necessary to develop a timeline so I could keep track of what would have been going on in the world at each of the points in time of the story. But if someone ended up the wrong age on this timeline, I could change the year of their birth to adjust. It is, after all, my story, not a history lesson.

• It is much easier to write straight narrative than dialog. It is even more difficult to balance the text between the two. I will likely write two versions of much of my story, one with dialog and one without and then work on integrating the two.

• Writing something every day is easier than I thought, especially when I didn't let chronology or history or details of the location interfere, but setting a word deadline for each day was more of a stretch than I could keep up. Writing at least 500 words each day for this project is possible because the pieces don't have to connect from one day to the next. Writing at least 1500 words per day on the same story every day is much more challenging.

• Next time I need to begin planning earlier. Next time I want to have an outline and a timeline complete before NaNoWriMo begins.