It’s National Novel Writing Month! Goal: write a 50K word novel in a month.
November is half over! But no matter where you are in the process, it’s not too late. If you haven’t signed up, signed in, and created your project, you can head on over to the www.NaNoWriMo.org website. Once you’ve got that done, start writing (in your MS document, or a plain old notebook, or tablet or ipad, or whatever!) and log your words every day on the NaNoWriMo site. All words are good words. You might meet the goal, but even if you don’t, you’ll make amazing progress on your novel!
There are as many roads to writing a successful novel as there are writers. Be warned that there can be many boulders, ruts, and barriers on the road to success. There are dead-ends and so many places you can turn. There are distractions like scenic viewpoints and rest stops. All of these are part of the fun of the journey!
Here are some inspirations to get you started, keep you moving, and lighten your heart as you go along the way.
1. Words for your word jar
Novels are made up of words. Here are 12 lovely words you can reach for when you’re stuck:
* balustrade: proective barrier, consisting of horizontal bar and its supports
* chutzpah: shameless boldness
* clack: to make a series of short, sharp noises
* doleful: suggesting mourning; unhappiness
* hustle: a scheme! Or to devote serious and sustained effort to; to move quickly
* lemon: a sour fruit; slang for something that is a failure or dud
* mellow: have a pleasantly flowing quality suggestive of music
* niche: a hollowed out space in a wall
* oodles: a considerable amount
*smog: atmospheric condition where suspended particles in the air rob it of transparency
*trample: to tread on heavily so as to injure or crush
*vicious: violently unfriendly; extreme in degree
2. Writing prompts!
You can check the writing prompts on this website for further inspiration, and of course, elsewhere, but here are 5 to incorporate in this week’s writing sessions.
*start today’s writing with the weather
*give your MC an errand to run
*have a flat tire
*your character is in a situation and reads upside down
*your character’s hungry and sticks their head in the refrigerator. What’s in there?
3. Dress up your writing with figurative language.
NaNoWriMo is about getting words on the page, without too much emphasis or worry about how pretty your style is or whether your grammar is proper. But trying to write “fancy” can add fun and flair to your writing sessions. Use these or any of your favorite figurative language devices.
* alliteration: The occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. E.g. “sweetly sung song”
* imagery: Sensory laden descriptive language. E.g. From “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden.”
* oxymoron: A figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g. faith unfaithful kept him falsely true) (e.g. jumbo shrimp).
* personification: The attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.
* understatement: The presentation of something as being smaller, worse, or less important than it actually is.
4. Take a dare!
You can find dares on the NaNoWriMo website http://www.nanowrimo.org in the forums. Some popular dares from years past include these:
* Create a human character based on your pet
* Make a character climb a tree
* Send a character on a blind date. Who do they meet?
* A minor character kicks your protagonist.
* One of your characters has an eccentric piece of furniture in their home with its own name and colorful history
* Character reads newspaper article aloud
* Have a character meet “Jenny Everywhere.” In other words, have a Jenny Everywhere character who shows up in multiple different-location scenes but as a background person
Keep writing!
Some find it easy to write every day. Others need support, motivation, and inspiration as the month goes on because novel-writing can be hard! Here’s hoping you find some fun inspiration in these suggestions. Try them. You can’t go wrong!
Writing a first draft is just finding the story. There are no wrong turns. If you hit a dead end, you just back up to where you made the wrong turn, change the dead-end text to white, and then resume writing. Keep writing! Enjoy the journey!