Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
NaNoWriMo 2009
A new thread for this year's NaNoWriMo!
What is it? The challenge is simply to write an entire short novel in a single month. As stated on the official website:
"National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30."
I think three forumites beat the challenge last year. Let's do better this time round.
What is it? The challenge is simply to write an entire short novel in a single month. As stated on the official website:
"National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30."
I think three forumites beat the challenge last year. Let's do better this time round.
Comments
Zombie, ninja, robot, cowboy, viking, monkey, samurai, wizard, monster, knight, lesbians from outer space.
In a mountain village far from the bustle of the rocket ports, a young girl is resurrected from the dead by her grandfather, a man feared throughout the land as that most evil of technologists, the necromancer. Her new body an unholy chimera of animal parts and infernal clockwork wrought of iron, she is a dutiful ward, learning the secret words of her people, the Kithulin, and waiting until after the moon has risen to run through the forest and gaze at the stars from whence her race came. The superstitious townsfolk talk of a unearthly white haired girl, leaping from the tops of the trees, of her eyes shining red in the moonlight, and bar their windows tightly at night, but it is not until they glimpse the monster hanging by her prehensile tail from the eves of the church an hour before dawn that they decide to take matters into their own hands. At dawn she sees the smoke rising and a great fear grips her heart, and it is only long after the mob leaves that she can creep sobbing from the forest to stand on the smoldering ashes of her home and bury what is left of her beloved caretaker. That night, with the stars to guide her, she sets out toward the nearest port town. Perhaps she can get by as a thief, her agility and her whispered charms letting her drift unnoticed as a breeze though a sleeping merchant's open window, or perhaps one of the off-worlder ale houses will hire her, not knowing what she is, thinking she's an alien waif of unknown species, far from home.
She is not expecting to meet the Northlander, with her loud laugh, and her rough way, and her sword that would dance only for the just. The tall girl, the brave girl, who would rather starve than betray her code of honor.
She could not have imagined that when Eir Skandia Revs-daughter would look at her, green eyes sparkling under her broad brimmed hat, from the back of her mechanical horse, her heart would skip a beat and her life would be changed forever.
(This is not actually a story I am going to write, but it's what Scott wanted.)
Our hero is a budding young twenty-something who is well on his way to happiness and prosperity. He notices a poster advertising for a test subject, and he decides to volunteer. As it turns out, they are testing a machine which allows people to look into their future, seeing their future selves movie-style and having a conversation with them. Future-hero is everything hero dreamed of: a beautiful wife, a fantastic job, a huge house, kids, the whole works.
Hero is extremely happy with this, and his quality of life improves tremendously for a while. So begins the bulk of the novel. As he starts to try and be future-hero, however, he starts to fall short. His life starts to fall apart, but he is still convinced that he will become future-hero at some point. Hero can't keep it up for long, and begins to lose hope, sending his life into a downward spiral.
The novel would be about his dealing with his shortcomings as compared to future-hero, and his life post-vision.
I posted some questions in the new writing thread, but that is a bit ahead of where you are now. So answer these questions:
- What is the main character's motivation? It can be something fuzzy like "Be successful" or "Be more successful than his older, better looking brother."
- What is his goal? This is something more specific. In you idea it becomes "become the person he knows he can be."
- What is stopping him getting to his goal? This is the antagonistic force in the story. So far you've not said what keeps him from attaining his goal.
- What is the main character's epiphany? What does he find out or learn along in his first few attempts at tackling the problem?
- What does he do with this new information to resolve the problem? Answer this question, and you have the final act of your story. He might not succeed at the end, lots of heroes become martyrs, but at least he'll be doing something proactive.
Hope this helps!
Meet Travis. Average geeky college junior. It's Christmas time, and Travis is flying home to Virginia from New York. However, tragedy strikes as a turbine in one of the engine flies loose, destroying then engine and, ultimately, sends the passengers of the plane to their doom.
Under the auspices of suspected terrorism, the DOD takes over the scene of the crash before anyone else arrives. Amongst the twisted, burning, wreckage, they find the barely alive Travis. He is unconscious, and probably better that way, as he is suffering major internal bleeding and nearly every bone is his body is broken. The DOD take him away and report it as a accident of poorly maintained equipment with no survivors.
Travis is taken to a government facility, where his brain is saved and kept alive. He is awake, but cannot hear, see, smell, or touch anything. After years of spending his time on the internet, slowly losing real world friends in favor of online ones, He is now completely disconnected from the world around him. His sole link; a brain/computer interface connected to the hearing and speech centers of his brain. Now the subject of a top secret research program, he finds himself to be the last ditch effort by the project managers to keep the funding coming.
His life has boiled down into a simple three word phrase: Succeed or Die.
Both of you have good ideas for part one and two of your story, meaning the setup of the pre-crisis situation and the character (part one), the crisis itself and the initial reaction of the main character (part two). What you are both missing is part three, where the main character gets to grips with the situation and starts becoming proactive, and part four, where we read what the main character finally does to win or lose the day.
If you start writing without knowing what will happen at the end you'll just meander all over the place and lose focus. If you know what you're aiming for you'll be able to push through to the end no problem. I know this very clearly from personal experience; each time I knew the end I've finished the project, and the times I've begun without a clear ending (only having a cool premise and first two parts like you guys) I've failed.
The good thing is you've got months to think about the second part of your stories, so when November gets here you'll be in great shape.
But, if they really haven't come up with the ending, then yes, that is an important place to start...Or end...
So my plan for this year is to write a prequel to a story I've already been working on for a few years (only in planning stages though, no actual writing). The original story I thought up is basically a revenge story about one man's quest to destroy his former leaders because they killed the love of his life. For this, I'm basically just going to do a smaller story on how that actually took place.
The story centers around a man who doesn't really have a name, since he was recruited from birth to be a part of what is called the Schule. The purpose of the Schule is to train mercenaries that get deployed to conflicts around the world. Every country knows of the Schule because it has one thing that no one else has, which is essentially magic. It's actually more similar to the Nin-jitsu of Naruto. So it's sort of like the ninja schools of Naruto combined with the extremities of ancient Sparta. In any case, the main character, who's name by the end is Seraph, which he carries on into the original story, is outstanding at what he does and rises quickly through the ranks. The leaders of the school feel threatened by him, and actively seek out to keep him from joining their ranks. To put it short and not give away too much, they do succeed, which leads to the ending where Seraph swears revenge on his love's grave.
For some reason, I don't really feel bad about giving away the ending to this since it's really just a back story in my mind. Supplementary material to what I feel is the real story.
I know there are a load of word tracking spreadsheets out there, but the ones I tested were tied too much to the 30 day, November only, 50,000 word target format of NaNoWriMo. I made a stripped-down spreadsheet for myself last year, and have used it to track another three novels since.
http://www.lukeburrage.com/temp/NaNoWriMo wordcount spreadsheet by Luke Burrage.xls
http://www.lukeburrage.com/temp/NaNoWriMo wordcount spreadsheet by Luke Burrage.ods
You can enter any number of days and target wordcount, and it does the rest for you. Also, when you miss a day, it redistributes your missed words across the remaining days, to make catching up less daunting.
I hope it helps someone.
Luke B.