Now that I’m gone in the Middle East, the Quark writing group has to find its way without me at the helm. So far (as far as I know) it’s been going really well, with Travis moderating the online meetings–from what I’ve seen, we’ve even got a few new people coming out, which will be really awesome if they keep coming into the fall. But sadly, he’s gotten too busy to handle things, so I had to find another replacement yesterday.
I thought: who would be better than Aneeka to head off the writing group? Turns out, she was up for it, so now I can rest well knowing that the club is still alive and still in good hands, even with me on the other side of the world and COMPLETELY out of the loop.
But the whole thing got me to thinking about what’s going to happen in the fall, when I get back to Utah and I’m back in charge of the writing group again…there is a lot that needs to be done. One of the things that a lot of people wanted to do was NaNoWriMo, something I haven’t done before but has become a really big thing among aspiring writers. It would be a good thing to bring us together, to bring in some new people, to build connections with the wider writing community out in Utah, etc etc…
Trouble is, if we’re going to be doing it as a club, that means that as writing vp, I should probably participate in it this year. And in order to participate, I need to come up with some idea for a story…
Story ideas are like fine wines: you have to bottle them up and let them ferment for a long time before they become very good. At least, that’s how it is for me. I’ve found out that if I try to write a story right after I’m struck by an idea, it doesn’t end up working very well. Kind of like drinking grape juice when you’re expecting wine (ok, as a Mormon I’ve never drunk alcohol in my life and I never will, but the metaphor seemed to work better than anything else I could come up with at the moment).
The point is, if I’m going to write a story and enjoy writing it, I need to have at least started working through all the major ideas for it for a long time. I don’t have to outline, I just have to have a sustained and growing excitement for the story. That means, however, that if I’m going to succeed at NaNoWriMo, I need to come up with an idea right now.
And, I’m happy to announce, I think that good, workable idea just popped into my head. Yay!
NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Week. The rules are really simple: start with 0 words on November 1st and get to 50,000 words (preferably a finished story) by November 30th. The point is NOT to write the best novel ever written–quite the opposite, in fact. It’s just to FINISH a novel and prove to yourself that you can do it. Even if it’s crap. Even if you’re super busy and never have the time to write. It’s more about proving something to yourself and gaining the encouragement and confidence that can launch you into writing something better.
So, I’m thinking that a NaNoWriMo novel shouldn’t take itself too seriously, shouldn’t try to pose as a seminal piece of literature, and shouldn’t be representative of the very best writing that I can do. If anything, it’s important to be entertaining and honest, but it can also be simple, quick, amateur, or even downright crappy and that’s ok.
To reflect this, the basic story premise should be simple yet engaging, fluid and easily adaptable, and pliable enough that I can twist it around in new ways as I go along and find out that I want to do something else. Above all else it needs to be excitable. When I say excitable, I mean that it should be something that I, as the writer, can be excited about–even after the story is more than two thirds of the way through and I start to get bored with the whole thing.
As I was thinking through all of this, a light popped on in my head and I had a miniature eureka moment. I thought: “what if I write a humorous Alice In Wonderland style adventure of a character that gets stuck in the part of my mind that I use when I write my stories?”
It could be this cool adventure slash meta-commentary on the struggles of being an aspiring writer! The main character would represent the characters that I write who take on a life of their own and shape the story by themselves–the struggle for her to find her way home would be her struggle against my own brain as I try and force the story in ways that it shouldn’t go! Along the way, she runs into people that represent some of my more interesting thoughts, in a Phantom Tollbooth / Neverending Story kind of way, and the conversations represent some of the more interesting questions that I would like to ask in my writing. Between here and there, all I have to do to figure out the setting and come up with cool sideplots is to open up my writer’s notebook and pull out random story ideas that I want to use someday. It could be really cool!
The really funny thing is that I HATE stories that are just about writers. They are so boring and unoriginal. Yet, if I do end up writing this story, it would be just like that…except different. Hopefully, the spin will be cool enough that all of the things that make stories about writers so awful won’t be in this story.
Here’s what I think I need to get down solid before I write the story: I need a STRONG main character, I need a quest / central struggle for him/her that will be the main conflict throughout the story, I need a mentor figure, I need an inciting incident, and I need a conclusion to wrap it all up. If you can think of anything else I’ll need, please let me know.
I’ve got some good ideas for these, but now I need to let them sit for a while, chew on them, put them together in different ways and see what happens, etc. Inshallah, by the time November comes around, I’ll be ready!
