NaNoWriMo -- or, Proof That My Family is Fabulously Crazy

National
Novel 
Writing
Month

(NaNoWriMo)

If you have read any of my posts, you may have figured out that my family enjoys learning and school and all the things that go along with it -- not saying we all aren't challenged by certain subjects, but overall the learning process is something that kicks along without many interruptions.  Couple this with the fact that we don't know what to do with ourselves when we're not "doing school" and you have a family that feels pretty ahead of the game by mid-October.
So, this year we are going to turn our attention sideways for a month and dedicate most of our school time and energy toward a gigantic writing project:  NaNoWriMo.

From their page (www.nanowrimo.org)
"National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing. On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought fleetingly about writing a novel."

I have participated myself three times, and found it an incredibly rewarding experience.

(SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!)  One product was a young adult novel actually eventually worthy of a Kindle version, which can be found here:  The Birdland Experiment on Amazon

:)

Why participate in NaNoWriMo with young people? 
1)  It is a good lesson in the reality that productive creativity (in any field) comes at the cost of hard work.
2)  It is a project with a beginning, middle, end, and definite goal.
3) Whether the novel produced at the end of the month is a Hemingway or a Horrible Mess, writing will improve during the course of lots of practice.
4) It will teach not only perseverance but teamwork as we encourage each other through the creatively dry times and celebrate the successes!  


I have found with any creative project that even though artistic and creative license can take over sometime during the course, detailed and intentional planning before the project is begun is the best assurance of success.  

The planning process that will take place over the last weeks in October is as follows:

1) Brainstorm.  Write down every topic that has ever crossed your mind as a good story and every character that you have ever thought would be interesting.

2) See which of these characters and stories will match well together.  (For example, a swashbuckling 1700's pirate with OCD and claustrophobia may not be available for a sci-fi story taking place in the caves of a faraway planet... but who knows?)

3) Read the preparatory advice on the NaNoWriMo site and SIGN UP!  (As they say, no one has ever "won" without starting...)
 https://nanowrimo.org/sign_up

4) Write a (very brief) summary of what is going to happen in your novel.  Just the beginning, middle, and end.  Where we start, where we end up, how we get there.  Very general.

5) The most important step!!  Write a detailed outline.  Plan how many chapters and basically what plot steps from there to here need to happen in each one.  Figure out how many words need to happen in each chapter.  
My favorite NaNoWriMo year was the one in which I planned the number of sections to coincide with the number of days in the month and knew what I was going to write about each day.  (Then my characters took over and had stuff happen to them that I never expected! But at least I had a framework to get them back on track!)

6) Remember that you are about to write a ROUGH DRAFT.  This is not a time to edit and it is not necessarily a time to flesh out past the number of words you have set for each section.  The goal is a completed novel with a beginning, middle, and end.  The rough draft may be the very short version!  Go fill in the rest of Les Miserables or The Eye of the World or War and Peace in December, and fix your errors, find the perfect word, take out parts that just don't fit or insert those perfectly crafted dialogue zingers then also.   Not in November!
(For your post NaNoWriMo crafting, I highly recommend "Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook" by Donald Maass.  In it are lots of ways to bring an already completed novel to a higher level!)

So here we go!  I am very excited to hear what stories are generated by my kids and if you or yours come along on this adventure please keep us posted in the comments!  

More details on "How it all works" here:   
http://nanowrimo.org/how-it-works

Go!  Write!  Win!  
:)