Well everybody, it's that time of year again: you guessed it, Jon's favorite time of the year: Nano! Which of course is short for Nanowrimo, which in turn is short for National Novel Writing Month. Which is, and always has been, the month of November. In fact, some of you may remember that I already wrote 50k words of rough draft material for this book JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO, so why am I doing it again?! This may come as a surprise, but there are now three different national novel writing months, every single year. YAY!!!!!
I'm in a virtual writing group on there called Magic Crystals, and it's for people writing sci-fi stories with any kind of weird technology that lets you explain away all sorts of awesome $#!+. The point is, I've been writing quite a bit on the message board over there, and I just had a great idea: I should post some of that over here as well. So here's what I was writing about tonight (after a brief run at my Nano project, of course).
The thing is, people on Nano are always talking about word sprints and writing prompts. But those have never really been my style. When I went back to school for writing a few years ago I learned about something much better for me: the in-depth writing exercise. These things blow those silly little prompts out of the water.
Here's my favorite one, one that I use all the time: it's called 100 Sentences. Write your story, chapter, or scene in 100 short, simple sentences. If you tend to think in long sentences with multiple clauses, learn to break it up into shorter chunks. You can put them back together later, in editing. Right now we only care about the ideas, not the final form of the grammar and vocab.
If you write by hand, number each line. If you prefer typing, start typing a numbered list. Either way, it may help to begin by writing sentences #1, 50, and 100 before any others. (The beginning, middle, and end of whatever part you're working on.) Then start from the beginning and start adding sentences. It's a good idea to write every-other-line first, so you can go back and add ideas in between later. That way, on the second pass you can check for what's missing (which in my case is usually setting, gestures, and 5 senses).
Like I said, you can do this for any level of your story. Taking a macro overview will help you generate a long-form synopsis, which can give you a clearer understanding of how to write your story. Take an existing scene that's too short and make it longer. Take a dead end, change something, and let yourself go.
The key thing to remember is that you're not committed to any particular line, phrasing, or word. You may surprise yourself with a really great-sounding line, but that should be secondary to the story. The more helpful thing would be to find new connections and new directions to take.
(OK Jon that's good enough, hopefully somebody will find it helpful.)
-Jon
By the way, the third Nano month, after November and April, is July.
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