Betty's Tips 11/11

Dear Fellow Writers,

Welcome back to my cozy little corner of the internet. Around here, the days are getting shorter, the mercury is dropping, and the leaves are moving from green to red. You what that means...

NaNoWriMo is HERE. National Novel Writing Month, that frenzy of novel writing that takes the insanity of day to day life and adds to it a foolhardy determination to write 50,000 words in a mere 30 days.

I love it. I mean, how can you beat the insane combination of art, over packed schedules, and competition. From where I'm standing, you can't.

This year I'm looking forward to NaNoWriMo. I'm thinking of expanding Dreams of an Eggplant into a fifty-thousand word opus tentatively entitled Dreams of the Salad Bar. I don't have much beyond the title at this point though, so I'd better get working. If you're not familiar with NaNoWriMo, I heartily suggest you check out their website: www.nanawrimo.org.

Writing 50,000 words in such a short time sounds like a mammoth feat. My friends in the Bethlehem Writers Group assure me that it's rather doable... that is, some of my friends say it's doable...the others are joining me on the skeptical side of the table. That's okay, I'm a pretty determined lady, so I'm going to give it my best effort.

In preparation, I've been surfing the internet for ways to prepare for the challenge. The rules of NaNoWriMo seem pretty straightforward: Write 50,000 words on a new story. I figure as long as I start Dreams of the Salad Bar from scratch and don't include anything from Dreams of an Eggplant I should be within those rules. There are, however, no restrictions against outlining, so I've been spending the last week or so doing just that.

Fortunately, Ehow has a delightful little article on outlining here: http://www.ehow.com/how_4887219_outline-your-novel.html that I've referred to repeatedly throughout this process. I note they say outlining is "moderately challenging." I wonder how challenging they think writing a novel would be?

In any case, it occurred to me that a good outline is nothing without vibrant characters to follow it. Of course, I have the character of the eggplant down pat, but I've been having trouble bringing the croutons to life. Fortunately, I stumbled across Writing for Performance's blog on Juno's Secondary Characters: http://robinkellyuk.blogspot.com/2008/03/junos-secondary-characters.html. Of course, Salad Bar isn't a comedy, but I think the rules, excuse me, techniques, still apply.

In my search for advice on characters I also ran across this Writers Digest article on raising characters above the status quo: http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/how-to-raise-your-characters-above-the-status-quo. This article is geared more toward revision than toward writing, but it never hurts to be prepared.

Once I had my characters in mind, I turned my thoughts to my story. As I contemplated my story's structure, I kept coming back to this video of Kurt Vonnegut: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ. I'm not sure which of the three story structures applies to Salad Bar, but I'll keep watching that video until I figure it out. If your computer doesn't play well with videos, I suggest you visit the transcript of the video here: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/kurt-vonnegut-at-the-blackboard.php?page=all

Considering my story's structure, led me to wonder what exactly I wanted my story to accomplish. I turned to the internet once again for advice. Premise is something I've always had a bit of trouble getting my mind around, but I think The Dark Salon does an excellent job explaining the concept in it's blog here: http://thedarksalon.blogspot.com/2011/10/nanowrimo-prep-whats-your-premise.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AlexandraSokoloff+%28Alexandra+Sokoloff%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Now, one cannot write about the dreams of an entire salad bar without having a through grounding in history. Fortunately, I stumbled across an enlightening Writers Digest's article on historical research here: http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/some-thoughts-on-historical-research. Now I just need to find an old journal written by a head of lettuce.

Since the protagonist of Salad Bar, Head O. Lettuce, is clearly male, I knew I would have to challenge myself to write from the male perspective. Again, I turned to Writers Digest and found this helpful article: http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/writing-the-male-point-of-view. Of course, if this proves too challenging, I can always go back to Egg P. Plant, the heroine of my last creative work.

Either way, I intend to write Salad Bar using limited third person after reading Carolyn Madison's article Unleashing the Power of Limited Third Person Point of View on Publishing Basics: http://www.publishingbasics.com/2011/09/05/unleashing-the-power-of-limited-third-person-point-of-view/. After all, if I go with my first inclination, a first person narrative told by Head O. Lettuce, I will rob the story of the delicious variety of perspectives available at the Bar. I can't wait to see how it turns out.

I'm feeling well prepared at this point, but I don't want to forget the fun of this challenge. And what's more fun than a cartoon word meter? Nothing, that's what. My favorite little word meter comes from writertopia. This helpful little guy is great for NaNoWriMo, or any time of year and is available at: http://www.writertopia.com/toolbox:

Definitely take some time to play around with this fabulous word meter to see all the different moods and actions he can perform. Hopefully, by the end of November, he'll be looking like this: