At least for me.
I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo since 2012. And I’ve won every year so far.
Except I probably won’t win this year. But that’s okay. I debated not participating, but that seemed no fun, so I joined in despite the fact I have no real expectations of writing 50,000 words this November, given what else I have going on during that month.
(Now watch, this will be the year I totally effortlessly crush it, or something.)
Anyway, this fact that I’m not gun-ho to win is not what makes this NaNo different from every other NaNo I’ve participated in.
No, what makes this year different is…
I’m not going to plan.
“WHOA WHOA WHOA”, I hear y’all saying. “But you have that whole NaNoWriMo Boot Camp thing on your website, and all these past years you’ve been telling us that the whole key to winning NaNoWriMo is to PREPARE for NaNoWriMo!!!”
Okay, well, I guess that’s still kind of true… in that you still need to prepare yourself mentally (and emotionally) and your friends and family emotionally for this not-small undertaking you’ll be tackling in the month of November.
But do you need to prepare your story? Do you need to outline and research and build your characters and such?
Not necessarily. You can, if you want, and if that works for you.
And that’s what I’ve done, the last several years. Because the first year I did NaNo, in 2012, I did not plan, and it was a shit-show. And the writing was hard and not fun and just generally… well, a shit-show. So I vowed to ne’er do that again!
The next few years I planned my little writer’s heart out. Each year I got better and better at planning and plotting. Till at last, the hardcore plotting really helped the writing of my epic fantasy get done in record time. (196k words in 10 months. Not too shabby!)
But now… now, well, I’m tossing all that out the window.
Because I accidentally wrote a 68k novel in 5 months as a background project (meaning I wasn’t even trying to write it quickly), and that thing was entirely and completely pantsed. And now that series has something like 20 book ideas in it, and my poor epic fantasy still doesn’t have a solid plot for book 3! *GASP*
There’s several reasons for that, (not just the fact that it was pantsed) which I might go into in another post. (TL;DR version: I’m a much, much better writer now than I was then. Hooray for growth and improvement!)
For now, I just wanted to make this introductory ramble as I mildly prep for my next NaNo adventure, to tell you peeps what’s up for this year and what’s different.
Because I’m going to be documenting this process, both for myself and for anyone else who’s interested. For this next project, I’ll be “writing into the dark” as Dean Wesley Smith puts it. Though I’m not starting with a completely blank canvas, of course.
The first book in this series is complete. I have some very vague ideas for what needs to happen in book 2. I have a rough idea of what I want the opening scene to be. And I’m going to start there, with that. I’m not doing any other story development on the thing until I start writing word 1 on day 1 of NaNoWriMo 2019. 🙂
Well, okay, I did take the time to create a fake cover for the project, because that’s fun and gets me even more excited to work on it! Here it is:
You can follow along with my progress by checking in here on the blog through the next two months, or see my profile on the official site here:
https://www.nanowrimo.org/participants/jrfrontera
See you on the flip side! (Or close enough to it, anyway…)
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