It was one year ago today I had to decide – Nano or nono? I was tempted not to do it. My wife felt it was a good idea – go for it.
Certainly, I was burned out after editing my first novels for so long, after writing two or three novels in one year, starting and almost finishing a fourth, and spending 18 months writing a full 10 hour miniseries. The last thing I wanted to do was commit myself to so much work – on top of other work – after an 18 month stint of producing more work than some writers do in a career.
She said do it. So I signed up for it. And went to bed, because I have a really bad habit of putting off decisions requiring a lot of work until bed time. I got that far, and done.
The next day, I pulled out my save the cat sheet, and filled out plot points. I then pulled out my 21 point sheet, thinking, “I’ll just copy the points in, and deal with this tomorrow.”
No, I finished that one too.
Last, I got my 60 point sheet, and filled in the 21 points. I think by the time I got home from work, I needed only about 30 points. I watched “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”.
The next day, I filled in 29 more. And I watched “a fistful of dollars.”
October 31, I opened Scrivener, and copied in all my points into a new project. If you’re not sure how, you just go to the cork board and add each bullet point to another index card.
And I wrote the last plot point. Set it to automatically back up into my dropbox, and shut it down. And watched “for a few dollars more.”
You don’t know how long it’s going to take to fill out your plot pages. If I weren’t so “in the moment” I might have been in trouble. I’ve started Save The Cat sheets, and gotten stuck right at “midpoint”.
Conclusion
if you absolutely have no ideas, the answer is probably – don’t. If you have an idea what to do, then do it. “I’ve only got an idea I have for a book I was thinking of…” Good. Plan it out. Plot it out. Just understand you’re going to be working really hard planning your novel until November 1. This is the one you’re writing for Nano.
Stuck for ideas still? Then call it Nono.
