Anna Staniszewski

If you’ve been living on another planet for a while, you might not have heard about NaNoWriMo and you might not know that it started on Sunday. I did NaNo last year and it was a crazy but rewarding experience. This year I’m using NaNo as an opportunity to try new things. For one, I’m using yWriter (akin to Scrivener) and so far it’s been working really well and helping to keep me on track. Also, I’m working on a fairy tale retelling which I’ve never done before. Lastly, I’m writing a dual POV narrative which I haven’t attempted in many years (because, to be honest, they’re hard!).

With all of these new things I’m trying out, I guess it’s not surprising that I sat down to write on Sunday and could barely crank out 200 words. I was trying to so many new things that it was hard to know where to start. So I did something I hardly ever do; I wrote out a summary of the entire novel. The ending is still a little fuzzy (in fact, I have two possible endings in mind) but having an overall story to tell made me feel a lot better.

Now that I have an idea of what my story is actually about, writing it has been a lot easier. One thing I’ve been trying to focus on is making sure the characters’ desires are clear; because I’m writing from dual POVs, this seems even more important than usual. Having two narrators telling the story means that they both need to have their own stories, as well as be linked to each others’ stories. Plus, there needs to be action throughout.

It just so happens I came across a great post on action and plot by Anthony James Barnett yesterday. It helped remind me that action can be psychological as well as physical. The point that stood out to me the most was about “contradictory beliefs.” In order for my dual narrative to work, I need to play with this idea of my two characters having fundamentally different ways of seeing the world; this will make them  more interesting as characters, and it will give me a lot more to play with in terms of conflict.

Happy NaNo everyone!