National Novel Writing Month isn’t new to me. This is my fifth year participating, and hoping I can pull out another win. I have won two times so far. One would think that I’d have this process down.
This year, I thought I would try something I have never done. OUTLINE. So I did. I had a title and a concept I loved. The concept was based upon a previous blog post of a lost friendship. I wanted to follow the journey of the damaged friendship, and attempt to achieve closure in the meantime. I had six chapters outlined. Come November 1st, I was read to go.
November 1st arrived and I did great. I technically followed my outline as the first scene took place where I originally intended and the first incident was the same. The outline stopped there.
Now I am almost 7K in and my book is turning into a paranormal book with a touch of romance instead of a contemporary women’s fiction. This scares me as I have never written a book, or even short story, along these lines. Most of my work has a touch of a thriller aspect in it, so I may have to reroute to a thriller instead. That is probably doable.
At about the 10K mark in NaNoWriMo, I often hit a wall. I am stuck and not sure where to go. This is coming fast and I expect to hit it tomorrow. The nice thing is that I am already head of the game so I have time to freak out. However, I don’t plan on stopping my writing. The awesome thing about this competition is that it’s about word count and getting an idea on paper. It’s the shit draft. When I’m done, I’ll look at and think “What the hell did I just write?” When I won NaNoWriMo last year, I took six months to completely rewrite what I wrote. But it gave me a start!
I’m doing great with NaNoWriMo 2013 and having a blast. The online support from Twitter is AMAZING. I couldn’t ask for a better group of writers to be aligned with.
Enough of this, though. The moral is outlining is not for me. And why am I wasting words here? 🙂
Between the pages 