Roadtrip to NaNo: How to Explore Time and Space

November is coming. To get ready, we’re taking a Road Trip to NaNoWriMo. On the way, we’ll hear from writers about how their cities can inspire your novel. Today, Margaret in New York City, NY dares you to reorient your writerly perspectives: 

New York: The City That Never Sleeps. It’s a common phrase, but it means a lot more than last calls at 4 a.m. and a 24-hour subway system. This town doesn’t run on one schedule, it runs on over 8 million.

Bodegas, hot dog carts and $1 pizza places line the streets of Midtown Manhattan and the Village, catering to this continual flux of pedestrian traffic. Trains full of 9-to-5ers pour out of Grand Central Station, giving way to tourists, then pre-curtain-call diners, then club-goers and night shift workers, on to the late-night partiers and night owls, until, as dawn breaks, early-shift workers and audition-goers pass through, re-starting the cycle all over again.

Space is reinvented each moment, both by the time of day and the people who populate it. On the same day, a single street corner hosts millionaires, dog walkers, artists, students, and charity workers, each in their own time.

The cute, homey bar in Alphabet City changes completely once college students decide it’s the happening place to be. When I was apartment hunting, the most popular question I got was “Have you been there at night?” A lively street can become a desolate wasteland come nightfall and, conversely, a quiet day-time street can bustle with life after dark.

When we write about a place, it’s easy to think of it only through the eyes of one person: usually through the eyes of the main character, or the eyes of one of their peers.

I challenge you to let your characters and readers see common places in new ways. Let someone forget their keys at work and return to the eerie quiet of their empty office building. Watch how things change when commuters have to take a different train at 2 a.m. because of construction, or get stranded in a transit strike and have to walk across a bridge to get home to another borough. Examine a busy Chinatown market through the eyes of a lost child, or an uncertain adult, or an adventurous teen.

You have the freedom to explore time and space when you write: take risks and change the feeling of a place as time goes on and as it is populated with new faces. You have the opportunity for all kinds of adventures in your writing. Try this one out and you may start seeing new ideas all around you, at any time of day—in your writing and perhaps even in your life!

Margaret has been living and writing in NYC for 10 years, and has been a part of NaNoWriMo since 2009. She writes professionally in addition to her fiction habit and blog. She’s also an avid crafter and loves knitting and sewing (especially stitching those NaNo achievement badges on!). Her favorite genres to work with are sci-fi and adventure, and New York offers her plenty of both everyday.