Larry M. Coleman

NaNoWriMo Day 3

I don’t know any creators of fictions who start writing with nothing but a blank page. (They may exist. I just haven’t met any.) Mostly you have something. An image, or a character. And mostly you also have either a beginning, a middle or an end. Middles are good to have, because by the time you reach the middle you have a pretty good head of steam up; and ends are great. If you know how it ends, you can just start somewhere, aim, and begin to write (and, if you’re lucky, it may even end where you were hoping to go). There may be writers who have beginnings, middles and ends before they sit down to write. I am rarely of their number.

So there I was, four years ago, with only a beginning. And you need more than a beginning if you’re going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you’ve written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.

—Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats

Okay, now that I’ve quoted that, here’s another quotation from the same book. Gaiman is describing his working relationship with Dave McKean as they were creating the film MirrorMask:

Dave McKean and I had worked together very happily for about sixteen years at that point. It had always been easy. This wasn’t.

Mostly it wasn’t, because Dave and I wrote, we discovered, in completely different ways. He plans it all out, and writes every idea down on little cards, needs it all to be done before the first word of script is written; whereas I’ll talk about it to the point where I’m ready to start writing, and then I start writing and find out the rest of it as I go along. These methods of working are not entirely compatible.

If you’re a planner, you’re in good company. Here’s a beautifully-written page of notes by Fyodor Dostoevsky as he was preparing to write Crime and Punishment. Notice that his character sketches are both figurative and literal.

I am not a planner. It’s not that I don’t come in with some ideas, concepts, maybe a few scattered lines (I almost always have the first line written ahead of time), and maybe a smattering of research, but that’s it. I have been like this ever since my second NaNoWriMo.

For my first two (long vanished) attempts, I had no plan. I had an idea, a beginning, but that was all. And, as Gaiman points out, that meant I had nowhere to go, so it’s no wonder I petered out after 5000 and 3000 words. So when I decided to try again almost two decades later, I planned more than I’ve ever planned anything before or since.

I brainstormed several different ideas. I already knew that I wanted a buddy adventure like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy except without the spacey bits. I think there’s so much interesting in the world that I’ll never be able to explore even a fraction of it, so I like writing about the real world (with a tiny twist). This cut down on the character creation time immensely, since all I needed was an Arthur Dent and a Ford Prefect. Naming them was easy: Karl Hyacinth was going to be the Ford Prefect stand-in and Richard Timothy was named after an extremely interesting oddball named Tom Pritchard.

Setting: Easy, Route 66. Plenty of interesting stuff there.

Plot: Oh boy. No real idea. I want two guys on bicycles on Route 66. What are they going to do? Oh, wait: Forrest Fenn’s treasure hunt is still going on and crazy things are still happening with it. (Unfortunately, the treasure was found before November 1st came. But it’s fiction inspired by the hunt, not based on it, so no problem.) They could be hunting it on bicycles. Why? Who knows. I’ll figure that out later.

That’s the end result of the planning. That throws out several pages of jottings and ideas that weren’t used. Some of which never will be because they’re atrocious, but the thing about brainstorming is giving yourself the freedom to defenestrate the inner censor for a while. It won’t work otherwise.

One of the things I tried was to write a logline for the story. A logline is a brief description of what it’s about. And by brief, I mean 1-3 sentences. And not particularly long sentences. Think of the descriptions you see on streaming services: that length or so. And, for me, that was the dumbest advice I think I’ve ever heard. How can you write a summary of a novel you haven’t written yet? You can’t. Or at least I can’t; you may have better luck with it.

So with this brief planning done, I went into my first “real” NaNoWriMo (real as in actually still exists on their servers) with characters, a place, a beginning, and an end (the treasure is either found or not). And guess what? It worked. All I had to do was keep moving them down Route 66 page by page.

You may be one of those people who likes writing things down on notecards or Post-Its or in Scrivener or wherever, compiling a stack of detailed notes and ideas. If that works for you, great. But don’t confuse planning with writing or use it as a way to procrastinate doing the actual writing work.

I come into each book with the title already written, and usually the first line. For the series books, titles are relatively easy because I like the two-word format. So far, there’s Ride On, Run Away, Gold Digger, Mount Britt, and Walk Off.

This time, I’m doing zero planning as a challenge to myself. Since the first two times I tried that which didn’t work, I’ve written over 900,000 words, so I’m interested to see if I’ve learned a thing or two along the way. I don’t even have a title for this one; I just call it “6” for now. I know it’s going to be Richard’s book, but I don’t know anything more about it. I’ll find out more November 1st through the 30th. I do, however, have the opening line:

Anna. Place of my birth, place of my near-death. Land of love, land of hate. Corn, thunderstorms, and nothing. A great place to be from.

That’s it. I would say that there’s no planning at all, but in a way, the previous five books have all been planning for this one.

However you choose to do it, good luck and have fun!