I know that NaNoWriMo is characteristically a fly-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants affair.
This has been a struggle for me from the first time I heard of it.
Oh, I do understand that the goal is not quality but quantity. However, my struggle is wondering if having little clue where I am headed will help me complete the novel in a month's time.
Today I broke down and started an outline, though it pained me to commit it to paper. All the possibilities that fell away the moment my plot began to take shape, all the ideas that would not work, all the requirements of characters and their situations--the outline quickly dictated the opening of my book and excluded some possibilities.
This is good.
It indicates to me that I have some sense of who my characters are and what they would or would not do. The outline is quite skeletal, only a page long, but there are between six and twelve scenes on that page, depending on how I divide them.
I wonder how many pages that will take up. I could imagine a novel developing out of another several scenes, and I wonder if all the characters I have will even play as large a role as I had expected.
The setting has already been shaken up, the ages of some characters lowered or raised based on who they have shown themselves to be in this scant outline.
And some challenges of my novel have become readily apparent. For most of my characters, I can imagine what they might be like. Others are more complicated and I feel the need to actually write them to discover their identity.
Already this endeavor seems to have taken on weight and form. It seems fun, but also like a lot of hard work.
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