OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
I am bubbling with ideas right now. They are coming thick and fast for my first NaNoWriMo novel, codename Morgan.
It has made me consider what is going on, because I always thought I was a non-fiction writer. I have had ideas for many things, but never fiction characters or situations…until now!
Here are my first 5 tips for NaNoWrMo preparation:
- Give yourself permission to write whatever comes. It doesn't matter. It's just about having fun! I have written on permission before. It is incredibly important to release your mental blocks.
- Refrain from writing. Write down ideas and moments but don't expand on them. Get frustrated with the need to write. I am literally straining at the bit to get started (and all those other wonderful cliches!). Be desperate to write and express yourself.
- Be open to ideas from all sources. Keep your mind open to anything that can add to your story. It might be other writing, some music. Flashes will come with little snippets of conversation, a scene perhaps, a memory to trigger an event in the book.
- Let the ideas percolate together. Let your mind work on the core idea while you sleep, while you exercise and muse on the commute. Muddling them together will create new ideas, new situations.
- Explode into action when the time comes. For me, this is November, so I am holding off until then according to the NaNoWriMo rules.
These have been keys to my poetry writing in the past, and perhaps this will help me through the fiction process.
What helps you to generate ideas and fuel the creative bubbling?
View Comments (5)
Great suggestions. I'm a fan of prompt-writing during October where you just take a word each day and write for 15 minutes straight.
I'm glad someone else is with me here Joanna! I am itching SO bad to start writing, but I'm holding back. The only thing I have done it take a few pages of notes to keep certain scenes and characters fresh and ready to go. If onlyI had some vacation time to use at work. . . I could take the next seven days off of work and just sleep until Halloween. . . hmm. . . that's not a bad idea. . .
I saw your twitter about NaNoWriMo and signed up myself for the first time. My username is JWinstonPhillips. I look forward to the challenge during the month of November.
I'm flirting with the idea of doing NaNo for the first time this year, but it might just be insanity with everything else going on at the moment. One of those things is a club I've started to make sure that I always have a pool of ideas to dip into, and make sure I write a story a month. Once I have a tiny seed of an idea, the rest comes easily to me, but that initial seed is something I struggle to come up with in isolation. So, in answer to your question, I've effectively outsourced ideas generation to my club; people send in ideas for short stories, I pick a winner and write a story from it. Then the winner gets to read it first, then the rest of the members read it afterwards. It's all free, now in its third month and has really improved my productivity. I heartily recommend it!
Well, when I won my debut NaNoWriMo in 2010, I gave myself permission to do fanfic and wound up with a sequel to H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. I let some of the responses I had to that novel percolate for a while, then figured out how I wanted it to end, worked the required plot developments backward from it and threw in some "wicked cool!" stuff like powered armour and two legged human Fighting Machines and just let the action roll. The end result was pretty plot-driven, but it was fun to write!