November is National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo. It’s a time of year when writers following the conventional rules challenge themselves to write 50,000 words in 30 days, or at least 1,666 words per day. Others use this month to set time-based intentions (e.g. write 1 hour a day for 30 days). Two members of the Inklette team are doing NaNoWriMo this year. Here we’ve shared a little bit about our preparation processes, and what the month looks like for us.

Naomi Day, Blog Editor

This year I’m doing NaNoWriMo with a friend based on the West Coast. Since we are both relatively susceptible to burnout and didn’t spend enough time preparing our projects, we’ve decided to do a time-based (rather than word-based) month. Every day we both spend at least one full hour writing, and then text the other person a summary of how we spent that time. Since I didn’t have the time to properly prep what I was going to be working on, I spent the first day planning out what projects I’ll be working on. I will be spending the rest of the month alternating between planning the outline of a novel I’ve spent the last four years writing and rewriting, and working on a series of short stories set in a shared world. The buddy system helps keep me accountable and gets me excited to share my work with someone who cares about me independent of my productivity, and the hour system allows me enough time to get immersed in a project but isn’t so long it feels unattainable to do daily. I figure I can always take that time away from scrolling Instagram if it starts to feel like I can’t find it elsewhere!

Thus far the challenge has been in finding inspiration when I am between projects. I tend to write when a line pops into my head, or I overhear a bit of dialog that I decide to put in a short story. I have never challenged myself to write regularly when I am not working on a project. So I’ve been pushing myself to find alternate ways to get to the inspiration that keeps me writing for hours at a time. For example, when I have a vague idea what I want to write about but I’m not sure where to start, I pick up a notepad and hand write a conversation between myself and the character I am interested in. Writing by hand is important because the slower pace helps me think through my words more freely, and the conversational style helps me uncover interesting details about my characters that may give me a clue as to where to begin their stories.

Savannah Summerlin, Blog Editor

I’ve always wanted to do Nanowrimo, but balancing the act of writing over 1,500 words a day along with an already heavy load of creative writing homework mandated by my classes always proved to be too much. Having graduated in May, I have a lot less motivation to write, so I figured this might be a good year to give Nanowrimo a go. 

The first thing I did was make a bevy of different folders and document so that I could keep my ideas organized. My story idea involves several different groups of people all from the same family, so it’s vital that I keep them separate. After that I divided the characters I know I’ll need into main, secondary and tertiary characters so I know how much detail I need to go into for them (in an ideal world my tertiary characters would be as detailed as my main characters mais c’est la vie).

Strangely enough, I didn’t have a beginning, middle or end plotted out when I started writing. That aligns with my general writing strategy, if you can call it that: I’ll get an idea for a character or plot point, usually in the middle of the night, and the story starts from there. Because this story has a lot of different main characters who won’t necessarily interact with each other (think “This is Us” but everything is happening on the same timeline), I could have started anywhere. And in theory, at least in these early stages, I can change the ordering of the story components so long as I don’t, for example, put a major holiday in one, rendering the ordering stationary.

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