Road Trip to NaNo: Expand Your Writing Toolkit

NaNoWriMo is an international event, and we’re taking a Road Trip to NaNo to hear about the stories being written every year in our hundreds of participating regions. Today, Moriah Blalock, our Municipal Liaison in the USA :: North Carolina :: Raleigh-Durham region, urges you to add some new tools to your writing toolkit:

Every Wednesday, I go to my favorite local coffee shop to work. Their tea lattes are heavenly, and the front porch offers a charming view of my hometown’s historic main street. Although it’s no longer the small town of 5,000 it was when I moved here, the feeling persists. My parents live 30 minutes to the south, surrounded by farmland. A hot air balloon festival takes place down the street every year. My brother-in-law lives 30 minutes to the north, in an urban neighborhood right between the area’s largest mall and a prominent historically black university. All three of these places are located in the Raleigh-Durham region of North Carolina.

My region is all about juxtaposition. A two-hour drive will take you to either the mountains or the ocean. You can visit the prize bulls at the State Fair, then head three blocks down the street to see the latest exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art. We’re quintessentially Southern—you can get a darn good sweet tea just about anywhere. But so many people have come here from up North that you don’t have to look hard for a decent New York-style pizza.

“Genre is, at its most basic, a toolkit.”

The Wrimos in our region embrace juxtaposition in the ways they play with genre. We have one author who writes Christian fiction featuring zombies, and another whose contract killers advocate for lifelong education. Another of our authors has combined the best tropes from movies and comics to publish a trilogy of heart-wrenching superhero novels. By breaking out of the norms of the genre, each author has written a stronger, more compelling novel.

Genre is, at its most basic, a toolkit. The rules are flexible, but it isn’t easy to know which are bedrock and which are window dressing. The two methods below are my personal favorites for breaking away from the boring.

1. Visit the Forums

You can’t discover new things if you never leave behind the familiar. Here, like anywhere else, you have to leave your neighborhood if you want to discover the unfamiliar. In NaNo Land, your neighborhood is your genre forum.

If you’re struggling with a specific part of your novel, the NaNo forum for your genre can be a godsend. Other fantasy writers are probably your best bet if you need a creative way to defeat a troll, after all. But if you’ve got the blahs about your whole project, pop into a forum you don’t usually visit. Let the horror forum villain discussions inspire the antagonist in your YA. Talk details and misdirection with the mystery folks to create extra tension in your literary fiction. Ask yourself the questions other authors are asking. You may be surprised to discover how much your novel has in common with theirs.

2. The Spaghetti Method—Throw Stuff at the Wall

The downside to always having something new: lots of the new things don’t stick around. Sometimes, that cool restaurant goes under. My sleepy hometown isn’t the ideal place for a nightlife-focused wine lounge, I guess. But when you’re writing a novel, the stakes are lower. Maybe you’ll waste a few hours on a bad idea, but you’ll learn something from it.

Take everything you think you know about your genre and toss it out. Who says literary fiction can’t have wizards in it? What if the main characters of your romance novel were birds? Why can’t action-adventure take place on the moon? If you embrace even the most unlikely ideas, eventually one will be just crazy enough to work. And at the very least, a UFO landing will pad your word count, right?

So here’s my challenge to you this November: take some big risks. NaNoWriMo is all about trying to do something amazing by doing something a little bit bananas. You’re already being brave and pushing your limits. What could you achieve if you pushed them a little further?

NaNoWriMo in USA :: North Carolina :: Raleigh-Durham

Moriah Blalock is heading into her first year as an ML. She lives in Apex, NC, with her husband, in a house that is going to collapse under the weight of all their books and musical instruments very soon. When not typing furiously and trying to keep the cat out of the tea cabinet, she is on the hunt for the perfect sugar-free pie recipe.

Top photo by Flickr user lisadonoghue.