NaNoWriMo 2008. 11 days to go. Less than that if I’m going to get up just after midnight on the 1st.
My plan is nowhere near as detailed as I would have liked, but I have a reasonable idea of what is going to happen, I have three significant protagonists and a couple of minor characters in pencil. I followed the instructions I mentioned in my previous post and managed to get some interesting things out of that. I have even had an ending jump me in a dark alley when I really hadn’t seen it coming.
In the “Procrastination Station” on the nano home page today there was a link to a forum post entitled “Cumulative Wisdom from 7 (successful) Nanowrimos, or I must’ve learned something from the last ~350,000 words!”. It was a great post, even if my experience differs with respect to the desirability of planning. What I loved was the plot breakdown, broken into sections of specified word length to fill up a November. I’m repeating it here because I think it is so great:
- 5,000 words: Teaser and exposition. Introduce the protagonist and why they are as they are.
- 2,000 words: Catalyst event. Introduce the second protagonist.
- 9,000 words: Exploration of the story world; new characters and nuggets of information. Things are still going well, but introduce the villain(s).
- 18,000 words: Things fall apart! The story becomes bigger than the characters. Things happen, they get saved, things get worse, repeat, repeat, repeat.
- 6,000 words: Reveal bigger quest.
- 6,000 words: Challenges are defeated. Things are learned. Characters change.
- 6,000 words: Resolve any leftover issues. Epilogue.
(Credit to moonpook).
I’m going to incorporate that into my plan. Did I say before I think this is great?
Right now I’m off to plan my writing schedule. I have at least a couple of days each week where I will get little or no writing done, so if I can plan around those days by getting more done on other days then I will not fall behind. If anything can be gained from my last two years, falling behind is fatal!
