NaNoWriMo Prep & Color-Coded Index Cards

Now that I’ve gotten the news about season 3 of Sherlock out of my system, kind of (see previous post), my brain’s back to thinking about November. NaNoWriMo.

I’m joining the hordes this time around. My writing group, Chattanooga Women Writers, is doing NaNoWriMo our way: we’ve decided to set our goal at 30,000 words and we’ll be working on our current novels, because although we’re allowed to suck we want to cut back on suckage as much as possible while still writing feverishly. We’re planning writing sessions during which there will be no talking or internet (that’s the plan anyway), and we’re planning on emerging victorious from this crucible of creativity and hard work.

So in order to make it possible for me to pound out 1000 words a day (which is a lot for me), I’ve been writing a pretty darn detailed outline of my WIP. I’m about 2/3 done and something has occurred to me: color-coded index cards would be very helpful in keeping track of character arcs, sub-plots, world-building and basically who said what when, and what day of the week, or month, it’s supposed to be. It’s kind of ridiculous, I can remember other people’s books in minute detail, mine – not so much. Maybe it’s because my brain is too busy constantly working on “what’s next” to remember two chapters ago. Who knows. One thing is clear though: index cards, or at least a color-coded spreadsheet might be an order. Now there’s an idea…

19 January 2014 on PBS

Write it and forget it. For a while, anyway.

I’ve done all sorts of writing things in the last several months: I’ve outlined, I’ve written, I’ve renamed a character and then renamed her again, I’ve scrapped whole sections immediately after writing them because they just didn’t feel right. What I haven’t done is read what I’ve written several weeks after writing it, which is exactly what I did on Monday for my critique group.

This experience proved to be nothing short of eye-opening. I saw some things I wasn’t proud of (grammar and spelling, I’m staring right at you), some that surprised me (one scene that gave me trouble when I wrote it read better than the one that came easily), and some that gave me pause (I’m not trying to write a YA novel, why did this section read like it belongs in one?). Sometimes it was downright embarrassing: you know it’s bad when you wrote the scene and you yourself can’t tell who’s talking. And it read just fine when I checked the pages before sending them out!

By the time I finished the two chapters I fully understood what Stephen King was talking about when he recommended leaving the book alone long enough for you to forget what exactly is in it. Doing that reveals all kinds of first-draft issues that hide in plain sight when you go over and over the same text in a short period of time. It also allows for more consistent revisions when you get to that step, whenever that might be. I know one thing: I won’t be revising until at least a month after the book is finished.