Here it is: the guide to surviving NaNoWriMo, part the first.

<lj-cut="wherein girl goes all awesome author on you">Writing a book begins, not very surprisingly, with having an idea.

Then we spend some time (in my case, almost two months) working on this idea, and on shaping and outlining the story.

Then November begins and we start to write, and we write, and write until we are finished.

EVERYBODY: Oh, sounds easy. So, we're meeting next November?

EVERYBODY: Wait. <b>Two months</b>?

Yeah. Two months.

Funny thing is, I actually came up with the idea for this year's book in July 2006. I spent some time on writing - I had about ten, maybe eleven scenes written down - but then I set it aside for the book of 2006.

I returned to my notebook in this year's July, read through the scenes that I had written, and realized that I had a big pile of crap on my hands. Or better yet: that I quite enjoyed some of the scenes, and some of the characters, but as a whole, the story made no sense. Oh, and it went nowhere, too.

So I took a pen, and on a new page of the notebook, I wrote more or less the following:

"okay, this sucks. [reasons for suckage]. So. Perhaps we should take it from another angle. Perhaps Daisy might actually [spoiler] instead of [spoiler]. And then [spoiler]." --- and so on, just very simple thoughts on how this idea of mine could be re-worked for it to actually <i>work</i>.

For a few days, I just wrote down everything that came to my mind - sometimes more coherent, longer ideas, like how the magic education worked, sometimes just loose thoughts, or titles of the chapters that I came up with. I didn't end up using every one of these things, and I changed quite a few of them on the way, but it's good to have them written down, because we are going to forget the details we've thought of two weeks ago.

At this point, I knew how the beginning would look like (more or less). I knew how the part-immediately-after-the-beginning would look like. I had some vague ideas of the ending. I slowly began to put it all into an outline. Again, it was very simple:

Chapter One. [Title]. [Character 1] does X.
Chapter Two. [Title]. [something]
Chapter Three. [Title] Daisy does Y.
and so on, figuring the details of the story as I went along.

Once I had the list of chapters, I decided to outline each of them separately, which looked more or less like that:

<i>Chapter One

I would like to begin with... perhaps in several scenes from various points of time... The first scene might be ... The second might be ... - oh, and if [this is what happens], I know now why [the character is at a place where she is now]. </i>

So, again, it was more writing down thoughts and ideas than composing a novel. In most of the chapter outlines, I just related what I thought should take place at this point of the story - all in present tense, "she goes, she meets, she does this and that", and without too many details.

Of course, sometimes I got an idea for something that would have to happen in a later chapter, or a general world-building idea, but I wrote it down anyway, and just marked it with a highlighter so as to easily notice that particular passage when I would be looking through the notebook.

Somewhere on the way, I also drew a map. Now, I agree with Terry Pratchett that beginning a fantasy novel by drawing a map is kinda sad (paraphrasing, of course), but since I seem to have no ability of imagining things in space, <i>and</i> since I mess up east with west even when I do have a map, this was rather necessary for me. (And in the end, having the map helped me a lot, so the ten minutes devoted to its drawing were worth it.)

Once I had the chapter-by-chapter outline, I decided to make myself even more organized, and I made a big stylesheet to which I slowly transferred all essential information about the book. I had the following columns:
Chapter (of course)
POV (I later gave every person a different highlighter colour, which allowed me to see that Isabel should really appear in the story earlier than in the Chapter 10.)
Characters (list of characters in the chapter)
Events (just a list, no details)
Plot points (everything that moved the main storylines along)
Problems (things that at this moment seemed not to be working in a given chapter, or in the story itself).

All in all, I finished planning and outlining in the beginning of October.

Afterwards, I didn't work a lot on the book. I slowly began to come up with the names of the places - up until that moment, the three main countries functioned as X, Y and Z - and with names of characters that I didn't have yet. (I named the major players back in 2006, but there were some secondary characters that needed naming.) I spent some time thinking about plot holes, or about some of the characters, and figuring out their backstories - I didn't write down all of it, but if something seemed important, I did.


And then it was November 1st already.


to be continued!</lj-cut>