NaNoWriMo is swiftly approaching!

November 1 is almost here! There's only a week and a few days left, before NaNoWriMo begins and I am doing it this year. If you don't know what this is, I'll explain. NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth, is a competition that occurs in November every year to see who can write a complete novel in one month's time (you get 30 days). "Novel" is defined as any large length piece of fiction of at least 50,000 words. They don't really care what you do with it as long as you get the 50k, and you don't write a single word until 12:00 am November 1. The prize? The satisfaction that you completed a novel. And CreateSpace (an Amazon company) lets you get yourself a free copy of your book in paperback form. Who's preventing you from cheating? No one, but why would you do it if not for yourself?

If you look a few posts back, you'll see one about prompts, and how I took that, and that's going to be my novel this year. I started writing it, got about 30 pages (book pages, not printed pages) into it and decided I was doing it all wrong. Part of it was that I read a book on Schizophrenia and realized I was writing the disorder all wrong. Part of it was that it wasn't going the way I had originally envisioned, which brings me to the main point of this:

Outlining and Planning:

NaNoWriMo allows you to plan and outline your novel as much as you want beforehand, as long as no work is made on the actual manuscript. So I have been planning and outlining, and writing down a plot synopsis. I never do this, and I'm a little worried of what might happen. I'm trying to be as vague as possible, because on the one hand I want to know where my novel is going, but on the other hand I still want to have limitless options. An outline can be restricting, giving an exact way to do the novel, but if a character suddenly says "No" to what I want him to do, can I listen to him? The answer is yes, because someone else didn't write my outline. I did, so if a character tells me he doesn't want to do something (and they do that a lot) and I can scratch it off the outline and pretend it never existed. But at least I know what's happening in a general sense. If you want to write a novel, you should probably do some outlining, but a short story probably doesn't need anything like that.

And Join NaNoWriMo!