NaNoWriMo Guide to Survival

I hit the halfway point of my NaNoWriMo novel yesterday. I’m still a little behind the goal for today, but I thought I would take a short break and tell you how to go about writing 50,000 words in a month the Christina G Gaudet way (aka wrong).

Step One

Go in with one idea and on Day 1 change your mind and go with something completely different. This way all of those pesky ideas that you’ve been working out in your brain become completely useless and you’ll be starting off completely blind.

Step Two

Don’t bother writing every day. Who wants to write an easy 1667 words a day when you could write 5000 words in one go every three days? It’s way more fun when you’re constantly well below that goal line on the NaNoGraph. If you were actually on par, you might not get to experience that feeling of panic every time you sit down to write.

Step Three

Plots are for losers. They just slow down the story and make it difficult for the characters to stand around doing nothing for three chapters at a time. Besides if you just keep writing, eventually a plot will emerge on its own. Either that or you’ll dig yourself into a deep hole that no amount of character killing and blowing things up can get you out of.

Step Four

Give every person in that crowded room your writing about a name and make sure that the reader needs to remember each one for later. Every Joe Blow is a main character in your story after all. Except that one guy. No one really cares about him.

Step Five

Have that one guy that no one cares about completely take over the story. Hey, maybe people will learn to care about him. And if not, you can always kill him off later.

Step Six

Just when you think you know where you’re going with the story, take a break, have a shower, go to sleep, whatever. When you get back to writing, you’ll have completely forgotten what you were doing and will have to spend a half hour trying to think of the same idea all over again.

  

Step Seven

Have a scene in your head which you’ve been working toward the entire story, and when you finally get there, completely change that scene so that it’s nothing like the awesomeness that you first envisioned. For example, if your two characters have been building to an amazing romantic scene, get them there and then have them fight. To the death. That’s a way better idea anyway.

 Step Eight

Know how people always say you should know how your story ends before writing the beginning? Well, in reality they are just jealous of you’re genius. You don’t have to have any idea how the story ends. It’ll end when you stop typing after the words “the end.” Who cares if anything was resolved or if the characters grew in any way. That stuff is for sissies.

Step Nine

Got a male main character? Make him sound and act like a girl, or vise-versa. You don’t want to fall into stereotypes after all. And you really don’t want people to be able to picture the character in their head as their reading. That would be too easy. Make them work to find out what your character is really like by using lots of contradictions and character traits that are never mentioned more than once.

Step Ten

When you get to the half way point of your story, make sure that you destroy everything that you’ve built up to that point with a giant explosion. You don’t need an established setting or main character. Get rid of them all, it will be like starting the book all over again!

NaNoWriMo 2011

This year I’ve decided to join the frenzy of National Novel Writing Month. I’ve been getting no where in edits for my latest book, not because making the edits is particularly difficult, but just because I’ve been making excuses to not sit down and do it. NaNoWriMo is all about just sitting down and doing it, no matter how crappy the writing might be, and I think that’s important for me right now. Otherwise I’ll end up going another month or two or three not writing or editing anything.

For NaNoWriMo, I’ve set aside the novel that I’m editing and starting fresh. When I was deciding whether or not to attempt this crazy goal of writing 50,000 words in a month, I came to the decision that yes I would, mostly because I saw it as a way to start the sequel to Magic High. Unfortunately when I finally sat down to write yesterday evening, after putting it off all day, I realized that I needed to work on something completely different. Magic High and my new book have a similar feel to them, so I need to try refreshing my brain by writing something completely different.

Now, I’ll admit, the story that I’m going to work on isn’t completely new. I got the idea from reading one of my old story ideas I had sitting around on my computer. I’m completely reworking it and may even combine a couple of story ideas into one, so I’m not going in completely blind, but it’s also an idea that I haven’t had fresh in my mind for years. It feels new even if it isn’t.

So let the frenzy begin! 1788 words written in day one and hopefully I’ll be able to keep up the pace. Want to follow my progress or become a writing buddy? I’ve joined the NaNoWriMo.org site in hopes of gaining a little more incentive to finish. My name on there is cggaudet so go ahead and make me a buddy. Good luck to all you fellow writers and see you at the end of the month.

New Design and Release Party

Looky looky at the new website design. As the official release quickly approaches for Magic High, (October 8th) I figured it was time to put a little magic in the website.

Talking about the official release, you might notice that it's a little bit late. As in, the book has been available for sale since the end of May 2011, and I'm finally having a release party in October 2011. There are reasons for this, and they aren't just me being lazy. One of the main reasons it's taken so long is because I was informed that having a summer release would end badly. As in no one would show up. Another reason is that I really wanted to have a release with my friend Brenda Hickey who just released her debut graphic novel In the Air. Since her book only just came back from the publisher in late August, there was no way we could do an earlier release together.

So what's happening at this release party? Well, I'm going to do a short reading from Magic High and Brenda is going to read some of In the Air while projecting the illustrations on the wall. We're going to have a draw for a copy of our books and best of all we are going to meet some potential fans. Assuming people come of course.

This will all be happening October 8th, at Timothy's World Coffee in Charlottetown, PE, from 1:30 to 3:30 or whenever we finish up. Not going to be anywhere near Charlottetown? That's alright! You can celebrate right along with us right here on my website. Hope to see you then!