4 syllables. It just works. I realized this not because I’m praising the start of the best productive writing time of the year (although I am excited) but because my choir is learning Handel’s Messiah and the chorus is stuck in my head.
I’ve been working out my 2016 NaNoWriMo masterpiece for a couple months now. One little bitty bit at a time. Part of the fun of Nnwm is the spontaneity, how it makes you dig to the core of your creativity to come up with the next thousand words. BUT. I have found it is much more effective to start with a basic plot and characters and background, so I don’t spend my writing time doing all this research. I need to spend it doing OTHER research.
This year I’m going back to my writing roots and setting the book in Cerinoit, the world I created in my childhood. It means a lot of digging into previous books to note prominent people (royalty, generals, magicians, etc.) and events. I’m almost finished with the digging, but I know there is a war that influences the characters in my new book, but… I can’t remember who’s at war with whom or why. So… more reading!!
Plot elements I have so far = girl becomes a monk to avoid the military draft; every person born in this country has a word of power, and all magic ability comes from that word (which almost but not quite totally breaks my already loose rules of magic for this world); girl learns her word (Flight), and is somehow pulled into the war repercussions (not the war itself, which is across the ocean, but politics, shortages, and turmoil that happens to the support people left behind). That’s all I got. November starts next week. Yup!
A few words for all you NaNoWriMo folks: Just write. You are exercising verbal fluency and strengthening the neural pathways necessary to come up with words, scenes, and conclusions quickly. That’s the real power of NaNoWriMo. That, and the confidence boost that comes when you can say “I’ve written a novel.”
Let’s have an awesome November!
Myra Karine & Her Blog 