On Planning

I love efficiency. If they put me in charge of the Superbowl, I could have that business over in 45 minutes. Maybe an hour, if there's double-lightning round-overtime or something. I don't know, I don't follow football. All I'm saying is I love not wasting time.

I also love having a plan. I drive my husband crazy on the weekends, asking him what his plan for the day was. You mean you're just going to sit around until something strikes your fancy? Seriously? I could shake the man.

So you would think that when I'm planning to tackle something as complex as a novel, I would obsessively outline and plot and plan some more. And I surely would. In fact, I have two blank journals sitting literally within arm's reach of me at this very second, begging me to start scribbling out a precise roadmap of exactly where my book will go.

And yet... I can't. I could. But I won't. This style of writing got me through college, when I had to punch out a dozen pages each week. It's efficient and organized and you are only limited by how fast your fingers can fly. It strips all the mystery and all the heavy-duty thinking out of the actual writing.

Yawn.

A lack of mystery is a great think for writing a historical thesis or a psychology research paper. It kills a novel. Mine, anyway. I have five finished novels to my name (or drafts of  said novels, at least), and I didn't outline any of them. I have dozens of finished outlines on my computer that haven't been opened since I hit Save.

So in a way, inefficiency is the most efficient way for me to finish a book. It's also the most fun way for me to finish a book, and unless I start raking in some cash, that's all that matters.

Okay. But seriously, I've got to have a plan. Starting 100% from scratch is a good way to stare at a blank page for hours. So my goal for October is to start the foundation with:

• Character sketches
• World-building
• A one-paragraph synopsis of the plot

I won't go too in-depth because these are just the starting points and are liable to change at any moment. Got to remember that! I've done pages of world-building only to toss it all out two sentences in. Not an exaggeration.

How much planning do you do before you start a new project? Any favorite tools to recommend?

The Birth of a Novel

I've been doing a lot of crafts recently. Nothing too big, but a few things turned out nice. So I opened a shop on Etsy.com and put a few things up for sale. Why not? It made a nice diversion from a teething baby and a kid going through the Terrible Twos.

Then the unthinkable happened, and I sold a few things. Oh, no! I worried. Now that I was a professional artist with almost two dozen whole dollars to my name, what would happen to my writing? Would my new career as a small businesswoman distract me from my dream of writing fiction?

Luckily, NaNoWriMo is almost here to get me back on track.

I've been participating in National Novel Writing Month since 2011. For anyone who isn't familiar, NaNoWriMo challenges writers to spit out 50,000 words during the month of November. That's 1,667 words a day. Every day. For 30 days. To put that in perspective, the average double-spaced typed page is abut 250 words.

So yeah. It's sort of crazy. Crazy awesome.

Anyway, because I'm a little bit crazy myself, I've decided to blog about my journey writing The Eleventh Door, from the planning stage in October, through the mad sprinting and word vomiting in November, and then to a more leisurely finish in December (and beyond?). I've even linked the Google Doc where I will do the actual story-writing (look in the tab "The Story So Far"), where readers can see the manuscript in real time.

So who else is diving in the deep end this year and doing NaNo?