November Encroacheth

[amberdulen]

Click here for our welcome post: What is NaNoMoJo?

My goodness, time flies.

With just a few days to go, are you scrawling footnotes on your outline or sipping umbrella drinks on a hammock? Or to put it another way: are you a plotter or a pantser? And how's that working for you?

Comments

[faedreamer]

I'm not doing either, actually. I just started a short story today that I need to have finished and submitted before NaNo starts. It'll end up being around 10,500 words. So I'm busy getting that story pumped out before Sunday night!

[highwing]

I have an outline of sorts for my NaNo, but it's a very unconventional one - so much so, that I scarcely dare to call it an outline at all. More like a thematic treatment - if that makes sense.

As I'd said in a previous post, this story idea's been rattling around in my head for a year or two, or more, so it's all a matter of working out the details ... but then, can't that be said of all novels? Who and what are the supporting characters, the settings, the plot incidentals and action, the overall arc? How exactly will things unfold on a scene-by-scene basis? I will say that I've got mental "rough drafts" of certain scenes, right down to exchanges of dialogue, sitting in my forebrain waiting to be unleashed in pixel form, as well as the opening line and a firm idea of the opening scene, and a good idea of the ending too, if not the actual words - more an idea of where everything's headed than an actual closing scene or line.

All in all, I'd say I'm in pretty good shape.

[tahmthelame]

I'm usually a pantser. My typical NaNo prep goes "Umm...werewolves in a college? Fraternity? Main character's name is Kurt? Yep, that's good enough."

THIS year, though, for whatever reason, I've got my three page outline and my twelve pages of character bios and my partially written treatise on the magic system. Soooo...yeah. Not sure what that's all about.

[lov3killsslowly]

The year before last I spent October writing an outline that was - JUST the outline - over 50,000 words on its own. By November I was sick of my story and got three chapters into it before I just quit. Last year I didn't do any planning and ended up with 50,000 words of bad quality writing that didn't make sense to anyone, myself included when I went back over it and read it later.

So this year I'm doing something in the middle. I'm making a vague outline. Until today I knew what I wanted to happen in the beginning and I knew what I wanted to happen in the end but there was about a month in there between the beginning and the end that I didn't know what to do with. So today this amazing idea popped into my head and I was like OMG! It's perfect.

So now, I'm pretty well prepared, I think.

[madtapa]

I'm usually a pantser, and I've won before using the on-the-fly method, but this year I'd like to try having a more solid idea beforehand. I have a vague beginning, middle, and end at the moment, and hope to have planned out plot points, if not an outline, before Monday. The hope is that a bit of direction will help me create a more interesting storyline and have an easier time putting words to paper, but we'll see...