Category: Writing

From a tweet about Nano:

NaNoWriMo is a month-long creative adventure that takes you deep into your imagination every November.

NaNoWriMo is your chance to finally write the first draft of that novel you’ve always meant to write.

NaNoWriMo is waiting for you.http://nanowrimo.org

I am so excited that Nanowrimo is starting tomorrow. I feel extremely well prepared this year, which is far and away better than I’ve done in years past. I think I will make my goal this year. I am doing somewhat of a Rebel Nano, in that I am re-working a novel that I worked on in a previous Nano, but I am changing it so completely that only a few hundred words are being kept. My viewpoint characters are no longer several children. I’m writing it third person omniscient, mainly from the viewpoint of the children’s aunt, uncle, and the person they think is the main villain. It’s a tie-in novel to another Nano novel from a few years ago now, which is another change I’ve made, so some of the world is different and there’s actually a bigger Big Bad out there that this family will eventually learn about at the end of the novel… it won’t quite affect their ending, as I’d originally envisioned it, but it does change where the characters are heading post-novel -one is heading to yet a third Nano novel from year’s past. I hadn’t realized that I was writing one of my side-characters there to be this character at the time, but when I came back to this piece, there he was waiting for me, tapping his foot and saying “See, you really have wanted to write me for a long, long time.”

 

Somewhere in one of my last writing posts I mentioned that I’d been having trouble when I came to the climax areas of novels. So this week I am working on beefing up my outlines, all the way down to scene synopsis, themes I’m trying to add in, and symbolism I’d like to use to add more depth to my writing. I’m working out of Lazette Gifford’s 2YN books and mainly using her outlining methods at the moment. That is where this particular novel actually started, oh, eight years ago. I did about 6 months of her classes (out of the 24 months she teaches; she covers from first ideas to finding an agent and sending query letters, and finally selling your novel) and then life just kept getting in the way. So for the rest of this month, I’m doing all the rest of the prep work I never finished before and I’m spending a couple hours a day on it for every “week” of the 2YN book (which was all I’d end up spending during the course of the week way back when I first started, so I think I’m good). I should end up writing at the point of actual writing just as Nanowrimo starts up, and when you condense down several of the “weeks” where she just shows you various ways of opening books across different genres you actually come out to thirty “weeks” of writing. November has 30 days and BAM, I’m doing a chapter a day. 🙂 That’s my plan, anyways.

Yesterday I went through all the half-novels, unfinished short stories, and other writings in my giant folder of Writing from the last 20 years and made a list of where I stopped in each and every case. Because I always stop before I am done with a story. I never, ever finish one. Oh, I have endings written, I just don’t carry through on the other bits…and I wanted to see what those stumbling blocks were.

In the beginning, it was actually writing that got me stopped. I outlined, wrote character sketches, started world building. I wrote a couple scenes within each story and an ending and then stopped and moved on to another idea.

Ten years ago, I would write and write without an outline. I had beginnings, middles, ends, but no transition scenes and no climax written.

In the last five years, I was outlining, world building, character sketching. and writing stories chronologically as they came in the novels, but then quit just as the climax of the novel came. I’d skip over it, then write a quick ending, and move on to the next book.

So looking back at my lists, I see a pattern: I don’t know how to write the climax scenes. I was talking about it with an indulgent friend who lets me talk about everything and in talking I realized that that is the part of books that when I’m reading them, I skim through them. I want to know the ending so bad that I don’t pay close attention to how they got there. I just want the end. And I’m like that in real life as well; if there is any way I can avoid a conflict, I will.

So now I know what I need to to work on. I am spending this morning going through all the writing books I own to find sections on writing climaxes and if I don’t find anything (I haven’t so far in 4 books), I will go out an buy another book. Anyone have any suggestions?