NaNoWriMo 2016 Prep 2: Kickstarting my Noggin

New rules are all well and good, but I still need something to apply them to. Stories have always been something I thought you needed to be compelled to do. That's what you get when you give an impressionable young mind some too much beatnik literature to get all enamored with before they knew any better. I am not gonna go into my first attempt at the NaNoWriMo challenge without some sort of game plan.

I've got a few ideas I'm playing with. I'm always wary of thinking about them too much or creating too much of an outline, because I don't want to get too set on any one plot before I start writing it. In the past I've always done that, structured out the entire story before I wrote word one. I knew how it was gonna end before it started. I think running RPGs has changed my perspective on the benefit of planning a story before you're in the thick of it.

That doesn't mean I'm not going in prepared. I know what that I want to write a story about a protagonist undertaking a long journey. I don't have a clear idea of a main character yet. I know a general plot that I am playing around with. I want it to be a sci-fi fantasy. I know that I don't necessarily want to come up with the entire thing before I start and constrict it to that formation for the duration.

So far what I have is the idea that in the future everything becomes automated by robots controlled by a central network. The robots break and forget how to do all the things they were programmed to do. As a result society falls apart as it had become too reliant on the robots to produce food for them. Things fall apart, end of the world happens. My story would begin around here. I'm toying with reasons someone would need to take a trip in this world and haven't set my mind down on anything just yet.

One of the things that drove me away from writing fiction was that I would get these ideas as I write the story as to how I would make it better. I would feel overwhelmed by the idea of changing it and rewriting things and so I'd push through and by the time the story was done I hated it. I need to avoid that this next month. I am planning to leave myself open for a lot to change from my initial story. I want lots of space to wander through in that world.

I've still got 11 days to prepare myself for this. I'm pretty sure I am forgetting to do something, but I'm even more sure that I'm excited to learn from this experience, good or bad.

Setting Goals Too High: NaNoWriMo 2016 Prep

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the goals I set for myself. I have this habit of setting goals that I have no real hope of achieving as a means to confirm all my self doubt that I never had a chance to begin with. It's a self defeating habit that feels like a warm blanket to the lazy. I've used this as a way to explain to myself that I'm bad at following through; which aside from being a questionable fact at best, it only leads to further discouragement and fewer goals achieved. This is a bad habit and I recognize my own fault in it.

I've realized that I need to start building smaller habits, setting smaller more achievable goals, and allow myself the grace of defeat without a mass degradation of my self worth. I'm starting with simple things that focus on my general health: drinking more water, more consistent bed time, more consistent with my pre-bike ride stretching, try to get more done after work, etc. I feel like accomplishing some of the smaller goals, establishing better habits surrounding the mundane things in my life, will make getting to the more important things easier. It's like getting a running start at the things I want to get done.

To that end, I can't help noticing that over the past few years my efforts towards creative writing have dwindled a great deal. It could have something to do with my youthful dreams growing older and being wet blanketed by reality. It could be that the creative part of me was replaced by the practical part of me that wants to get along happily more than it wants the world to understand me. Or might also have something to do with all the RPG GMing I'm doing and the write ups I'm doing for those are soaking up brain juices left and right. Whatever the cause, it has been a long time since I tried to write any poetry and even longer since I tried writing any fiction. Naturally I thought there's no better way to get back into it than a panicked 30 day writing session for as of yet not conceived novel for National Novel Writing Month this November.

I've never tried it before: writing a novel. I've definitely never tried to write a novel in a month, but this year I'm going to try. I don't have any idea what the novel is going to be about or how I'll get 50,000 words out of a month. I don't know that I've ever tried writing 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or whether or not I'm physically capable of getting that many words out each day. That's why I'm starting early with my efforts to get some prep work in.

I spend so much time thinking about how to tell stories in RPGs that I am running. I want to translate that into solo fiction if at all possible. Between now and when I start on November 1, 2016 I want to come up with my rules for writing without brakes. I have a habit of editing as I go; which will be the death of this effort if I really try it.  I need to not do that for this. I want to see if I can try to test some of my GM-ing techniques with the solo-fiction I am writing. The entire whole effort will shove me out of my comfort zone enough that I'll hopefully have something to show for it.

Until next time, I'll be brainstorming ideas on how to keep going.