Planning for NaNoWriMo 2023
If This Isn’t Nice, I Don’t Know What Is…Kurt Vonnegut
So, I’m working on what my next book is going to be about. The one I plan to start writing in six days during November. The NaNoWriMo writing challenge is here every year in November. First of all, it’s free. All you do is show up. They very politely ask what your project name is, for instance, the title of your story. I don’t know right now because I haven’t written the book. Just because I didn’t want to call it Project 437, I named it Fear, Love, and Assholes. As time goes by, the title may change. Right now, it is a placeholder. I even designed a cover for the book, so I don’t have to go with the generic piece that the NaNoWriMo people provide.
Again, Love, Fear & Assholes is just a placeholder until I decide for sure.
So, I went to SkillShare.com, where I have an account, and figured somebody there was likely to have made a course on how to outline a book. There was. I chose the first offered, figuring I’ve only got six days to figure something out. The course is not long. I’ll put a link to it below. The lady is young. Her voice is slightly annoying to me, but that’s okay. A lot of people’s voices are annoying to me. She’s got this hesitant catch that I used to have. I don’t know why I don’t have it anymore. My own voice was annoying to me. If I were to hear myself speaking now, it would probably be annoying to me, and I’ve only forgotten that I had this gravely hesitant voice when, in fact, I might still have it. Anyway, if you check out her video, you are forewarned.
She’s actually got some good stuff going on. She talked about going pantser style, which is pretty much what I’ve done all the years I’ve set out to write a book. The pantser style is by the seat of your pants. No plan. For me, it quickly becomes a plan. I can plan out a book in half an hour. Really. I’ve done it before. I use a big piece of paper with a sentence in the middle, the premise of the book. Sometimes, I circle it. Then, these vines start growing off of the middle bubble. Those turn into chapters. Ten to fifteen are fine. I might use them or not. It really doesn’t matter.
I take that diagram, and I write the whole book in one sentence on my computer. Then, I take that one sentence and knock it into two sentences. Then, I knock each one of those sentences in half again. I keep doing this until I’ve got a bunch of sentences. Then, I go back to the beginning of what I just wrote, and I take each one of those ten or fifteen sentences I have and make medium-sized paragraphs out of them. Before you know it, I will have written two or three pages, and that’s what my book is going to be. It’s what I’ve been doing for years, and it takes about half an hour.
Perhaps I am worrying about nothing.
I’ve always imagined the energy of the stories I write are sine waves. Up for excitement, down for despair. Up and down. Up and down. I can feel the tension gathering. I can’t get out of my seat. You know. You can feel this story bleeding out of you. It’s like smoking. You can’t stop.
So, because of this course I’m taking, I was exposed to the Narrative Arc. Then, to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. So, I’m considering them. There is value to both. Perhaps I can apply them this time to my sine wave. And then, I found Kurt Vonnegut explaining how stories track. That’s all. I might not necessarily need to do any more research.
Kurt is a favorite writer. What’s cool is because I am old and forgetful now, I can’t remember the stories, and I’m sure I read plenty of them in my younger years. Back when I was going to school, many were required reading. I’d imagine they are banned now. I just checked and evidently, Slaughterhouse Five has been banned here and there. It’s autobiographical in nature, closely following his own experiences as a POW in Germany in World War II.
The Links: The entire hour-long YouTube video of Kurt Vonnegut talking at Case Western Reserve University located in Cleveland, Ohio. I would say watching the whole thing is of value if you are a fan of Vonnegut. But the part about the stories starts at about 37 minutes into the video.
Holy cow. I didn’t realize Vonnegut had written a book about writing. I just bought a Kindle copy. It is Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell. It was published in 2019, many years after Vonnegut had died, which was in 2007. Suzanne was a student of his and followed him as he moved around all the years after she met him. She was a student and a good friend. The contract she got to write the book was that 60% of it be Kurt’s own words. It’s worth a read.
Another one of my favorite books is by Ray Bradbury Zen In the Art of Writing. It’s a short book but well worth reading. I rank it right up there with Stephen King’s On Writing.
The Skillshare Class is by Maxxe Rianne — How to Outline Your Novel
Here is a screenshot of my projects dating back to 2019 at NaNoWriMo. I finished three of them.
