Living the Fictional Dream

I can’t believe how fast the summer flew by. It seems like just a blink ago it was June! And now it’s September, and Writer’s Ink is getting ready to gear up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, or just NaNo — writers are often called WriMos). NaNo happens in November, but it takes a while to get your idea in place, do any outlines or other prep work, etc.

We have quite a few successful NaNo veterans in my writing group, and it’s something we look forward to every year. This year, we’ve decided that October will be our NaNo planning month. We’ll devote our meeting time (aside from any crits we have) to prep work for NaNo and other planning exercises.

Last year was the first year since 2005 that I participated and didn’t win NaNo. My failure was due to the lack of an idea I was really invested in. I had an idea that I kind of liked and started with that, but I guess I wasn’t feeling it enough because it never gelled, and I abandoned it after a couple of days and a couple thousand words.

Then I tried to write the sequel to my sucessful novel from the year before. However, since I’m not done revising that first novel, the sequel stalled a bit. Also, I made a crucial plot decision in the first chapter that set the tone for the rest of the book, but about the time I hit 6K I realized that I should have done something different.

I totally wasn’t ready to chuck it all and start over again, so I threw in the towel and used NaNo to focus on all my burgeoning short story ideas instead. I didn’t write 50K, but I wrote several stories that ended up finding homes, including “Zero to Clean in
Ten Minutes or Less,” “Remember?,” and “The Widow and the Stranger.” So it was a productive November, no matter how you look at it.

Now I need to decide what I’m going to do this year. I really don’t want to branch out into another novel idea that will wind up a first draft in need of heavy revision. I’ve got several of those lying around. Novel revision is apparently my big weakness as a writer.

One thought I had is that perhaps I should take one of those novels that needs revision (the revision is pretty major — pretty much total rewrites) and work on that. There would probably be 50K of new text, and it might end up more polished than the typical NaNo novel, because it’s already been done once.

The other thought I had is to write 50K worth of short stories. Then I’d come out of November with tons of stuff to market. Or at least tons of stuff to prep for submissions, but I’m much better with following through on revision of a short piece. Maybe because it doesn’t take so long!

Well, I still have a month and a half or so to decide, which is a good thing. Of course, most of that time will be eaten up with work. The fall is my company’s busiest time!

What about you guys? Any Wrimos or potential Wrimos out there? Any tips or tricks to share?