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To plan or not to plan
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As Seattle’s writers get excited about the upcoming NaNoWriMo, the age-old debate over how much planning is the right amount rages on. People fall generally into three camps: those who plan, outline, and do character sketches for as much as a year before beginning to write on November 1, those who go into the month with a general idea that revolves around a theme, genre, or set of characters, and those who will pick up their computers at midnight on Halloween and surprise themselves.
When it comes down to it, history has proven there is no right or wrong approach. National Novel Writing Month founder Chris Baty wrote a guidebook for how to do NaNoWriMo titled No Plot, No Problem, which is a fair indication of how many people approach the challenge.
“Life.universe.pie,” the pseudonym for a downtown Seattle writer, has been working on a concept for an epic novel series for five years now. Her concept is to use NaNoWriMo to write the backstory for one of her characters. On the other hand, “Thalassa_Gray” of Ballard thinks she will “do what I did last time, and find out what I'm going to write when I start writing.”
For most writers, some degree of planning goes into having characters and theme, or at least a problem-statement to start with. The brief version is often the basis for a one-sentence pitch for the novel. “One day people simply stop dying. Nothing else changes. They still get old and sick.” From that point, they will develop a main character (MC) and how the situation impacts his life. “Dr. James Patrick, an epidemiologist at the CDC, battles to restore death to human experience before the world is overpopulated with miserable old people.”
Some writers will fill in character details, motivations, major conflicts, and perhaps even a rough outline before they begin writing. “Dr. Patrick’s father is widely held to have been the last person on earth to have died and is esteemed almost to sainthood by most of the world’s population. Restoring death is the only way he can ever live up to his father’s legacy.”
Though it may seem like little to go on when starting a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, many writers will try, and many will succeed.
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