NaNoWriMo - Prep Day One

Well, the day is looming just a wee two days away, and my feet are positively tickled with nervousness. (Yes, my feet)

Are you wondering what I am talking about? Of course you are. You see, for the first time ever, I have decided to participate in NaNoWriMo!

*Applause*

Thank you, thank you. For those that have not heard of it, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It is for all of those writers out there that work best under pressure, and it encourages them to accomplish one of the greatest writing feats of all.

No, not writing with their toes. Good guess.

It's actually for writing a novel! (Did the title give it away?)

The challenge of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. Of course, novels can be bigger, but this is the bare minimum required for it to be considered a "novel". You may be wondering why I have decided to wait until November to try to write a novel. Well, the truth is that I am a lazy person, and I hope that the concept of writing 50,000 words in one is enough incentive for me to actually accomplish it.

I have never written a novel before. Ever. Unless you can't the novels I half started, then I've written a dozen. Yeah, I'm not good at finishing things. The furthest I got in a novel was about 24,000 words, and that failed because I had no idea how the story was going. This is because I am a seat of her pants kind of writer, and I avoid plotting stories at all costs most of the time. Plotting is really boring to me, but after failing horribly with my other novel, I have decided to actually try to PLOT this time.

*YAY*

So, having never plotted before. I tried many methods. I tried a Snowflake method, but that was too technical. I finally decided on doing this thing using index cards. I write one scene on a card, and repeat times 100 until I have enough scenes to piece together into a story. Due to my lack of organization, my "Plot Area" got really messy. This is what it looked like when it was just a pile of ideas:

Of course, that was only random scenes in a random order, so I HAD to make it look better and more coherent, so it eventually turned into this:

Yeah, that's much prettier.

I don't have all my plot down, but I know for a fact that if I try I'll lose some of my creative juices in the process, so I'm going to leave it as it is for now.

All I have to do is wait for Nov. 1st! I am hoping, if I'm not too tired, to keep you posted on my progress. It's hard to do this stuff alone, ya know! 'Til next time.