Letters to Kel: NANO TIME!

Saturday, November 1 -- National Novel Writing Month begins!

This is one of the best tools I've found for getting that dreaded first draft out there.

NaNoWriMo focuses on QUANTITY -- the goal is 50,000 words in 30 days -- roughly 1,667 words per day. When you break it down into small chunks like that, it looks so do-able, doesn't it?

You're going for number of words per day, and the focus on just getting the words out there sort of breaks past the barrier that your internal editor puts up in your brain. It teaches you to ignore the nagging little voice that insists, "It has to be good the FIRST time you write it down."

Umm ... NO! It ain't necessarily so.

I've found that just going for it, writing anything that comes to mind, giving myself permission to write a lousy first draft and follow tangents and rabbit trails ... leads to wonderful surprises. If you can't figure out what's supposed to happen next, forget about the outline or the general idea of what your character needs to do to get to your goal at the end of the book. Write about something weird. Put some obstacles in his or her path. Have someone nasty show up. Have someone show up who knows more about your character than you do -- and then spend the day's quota of words figuring out what it is, teasing your characters and your readers. As one author said, whenever you hit a block, SHOOT someone. Guaranteed to get things stirred up! Well, you don't have to specifically shoot one of your characters, but have some catastrophe hit. Who knows? You might just decide the weird event -- a meteor shower on a sunny day, a cop insisting that someone pay the traffic tickets now, a long-lost brother when the character thought he was an only child, a lottery ticket with the winning numbers .... get the idea? -- that weird event might just reveal things about your character you didn't know, or set up a sub-plot that is a lot more fun than what you planned to use.

It could be the fix for your block.

So NaNo in November. It'll be great fun!

www.NaNoWriMo.org

I'll be reporting on my progress on rough drafting my next Neighborlee, Ohio novel, "Hoax, Inc." In several previous stories, I mentioned Kurt Hanson's girlfriend, Jane, who runs a spa and has .... interesting talents. This is the story of how Jane came to Neighborlee and the "wizard's duel" that occurred between her and Kurt before they decided they liked each other!