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.