In about five or six weeks, NaNoWriMo ‘19 begins. After having done it for thirteen or fourteen years of doing NaNoWriMo, it seems like I’m finally getting serious about the story I’m telling. I now have two books about writing, plus several sheets on a method of novel writing that is supposedly based upon science. At least the guy who came up with it is a physicist.
Always before, I was a pantser, writing by the seat of my pants. It seemed to work most days, although I did face quite a few mornings with a blank screen, and a blank mind. Or a mind thinking about everything else but my story. I solved that problem by writing out by hand at least a page or two of the chapter I was set to write the next morning, Then, using my Dragon, I’d read aloud what I had scribbled the night before, and go on from there. I would dictate in that vein until I reached my two thousand word word goal and finish the chapter.
But this year, the folks who set up NaNoWriMo seem to want us writers to set a higher bar, so they’ve declared September and October “NaNo prep months.” When I first joined NaNo, they didn’t even seem to care whether we had a plot or not. As far as they were concerned, we could just type the same word fifty thousand times. But to me, it wasn’t a novel if it didn’t have a plot. You might be able to, in a literary novel, if you were the late great William S. Burroughs, get away with repeating the same phrase over and over, or have a chapter made up of just one or two pages. But writing in genre fiction, as I do, I expected each and every chapter to advance the story. It looks as though my fervor has caught on with the rest of those managing the website.
If you’ve just now joined me, I write in the genre loosely called “speculative fiction.” This includes: Scifi, fantasy, paranormal fiction, and horror. There maybe other subgenres I’m not aware of, and since Crimson Frost Books is a romance house, it should have a romantic aspect to the story. Well, it would because I’m somewhat of a romantic myself, although I cannot tolerate reading contemporary romances. I tried one one; it was a Harlequin title, and I got nauseous before finishing the first page. I like my fiction to have a fantastic aspect to it. Too much like the life I’m currently living, and I get turned off. Unless it’s nonfiction, like the book I brought home from the library today, Story Genius, I read for its escapist value, its power to pull me out of the humdrum life I’m living, and plop me into another world or time.
The instructional sheets I’m using, called “The Snowflake Method,” start with a single sentence, of what the story is about, and expand into a paragraph, snowballing into five or six paragraphs, then further into scenes and so forth, until the entire story is told. The man has a book on it too, but since all the money in my account is earmarked for certain bills coming due just before payday I can’t buy it just now.It’s an exciting method, as though I’m getting a Master’s class in novel writing, but we’ll just see how it all turns out, shall we?
