Nano-Story Ideas

nano

Extremely small

Short for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)

So, I’ve been thinking on this whole need-a-plot idea for Nano. Obviously I didn’t do well last year. I got stuck on the first scene and just couldn’t get going and quite frankly I don’t want to do that again this year. Duh.

Anyway, believe it or not, my shrink gave me an idea. She suggested that since I do have a sense of humor (I know not everyone out there actually thinks so. :p) that I should write what I know. I know that sounds like what all advisors of writing tell you, but in this case what she means is that I should take the whole experience of losing my job and moving to Maine and being a whole displaced Southerner and discovering Fall and Winter for the first time and write about it. But obviously I’m not meant to dweal on the pain and agony and angst of it all — I’m supposed to write about it with that aforementioned sense of humor. I mean, there is some humor in all of this what with the battles of will to tranquillize two cats 3 days in a row for a 1700 mile road trip into the unknown and the first experience of having to dig my jeep out of the snow and all of my OCD and other quirks.

Building on that, obviously, I really don’t want to write the facts. I think that would be boring. No one wants to read “At 9:03am on December 12th, I was involuntarily terminated. I then spent 3 months staring at TBS and Lifetime and eating cheese puffs and stale popcorn from a can.”

So, I’ll embellish.

My mother thinks I need to add a love interest to peak people’s interest. I think she’s just trying to add in her wishful fantasy to my plot.

Really, there isn’t a lot of plot idea in this. It’s mostly about the journey…strangely it’s kind of Jack Kerouac meets Bridget Jones — and I hated reading Kerouac.

Now I have to think of a new name for me and change the written me up enough to not become to attached to the character. I need to decide on if I’m going to write in first person or third — most of my internal voice on this idea has been first person, but I’m afraid that might be limiting.

However, it might be tempting to try to write the whole 50K word novella as a blog…each entry tells a little more of the story. Hmmmm… I used to keep character journals for characters I played in tabletop RPGs. Some of my best character development came from that. Plus, I liked reading journals of dead/famous people when I was younger. Could be an interesting idea.

tags: NaNoWriMo, writing

One comment

1. on October 20, 2005 at 2:47 pm

   Tamara said:

   I’m writing my NaNo as a diary/journal (although I may do a blog — good idea!) because I’ll be entering a contest later on that has that as a requirement.

   I love the way you created a dictionary entry at the top. I *snerk* every time I see the NaNo Technology topic at the NaNo boards!

   BTW, I was a Spiritualist on that quiz. Not so far from Humanist.

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