2. Write a book - November National Novel Writing Month

I love creative writing, and I also love a challenge. So when I heard about National Novel Writing Month years ago, I wanted to give it a try. 50k words in 30 days takes a fair amount of intention and planning. You have to write every day, you have to make a point of arranging your life so that you can write every day, and (if you're me) you have to have a plan of what you're going to write. We're living in a particularly odd period of time for writing and reading. On the one hand, reading is becoming more and more popular and there are so many amazing books being published. But at the same time there are truckloads of AI slop being generated and using the work of talented writers to regurgitate the same stories in different ways. So this goal isn't just about writing, but also being intentional about what we lose when we give over part of our creativity to generative AI.

In past runs at the NaNoWriMo goal, I've set milestones, meal prepped for all of my dinners for the entire month (as if anyone needs to convince me to spend an entire fall month eating soups!), and set a daily schedule for when I was going to write (often writing during lunch every day at work). I don't know quite what I'll do this year, but for this goal I am going to attempt to hit the 50k goal in November and edit the resulting text in December over winter break to hopefully have a readable draft at the end of this.

Outline

I've tried NaNoWriMo various ways, and some definitely work better for me than others. I've tried just writing with no specific plan and I've tried planning out extensive details ahead of time, including maps, drawings, character sheets, name glossaries, ect. However, I found in trying to write a book draft, I could plan for weeks on end, and when the story started, I would wander off in other directions that I hadn't necessarily planned out, because I was following my characters or the world I was creating without wanting to be limited by something I had carefully planned out weeks ago. With my academic writing, I always worked from a very well defined outline. I would spend a lot of time planning out what I was going to write, how long each section needed to take, and then I would write the final draft in one go. Not the ideal scenario for my instructors that wanted to see rough drafts and final drafts, but it makes the entire process faster for me since editing and rewriting took much less time than if I had written several drafts of the same document. So for this month, I'm using the Save the Cat beats as a word count outline, and structuring the book along "beats" to keep the story on track, but I'm not planning out extensive details ahead of time. I'm going to let the story go where it wants to go. And we'll see where we end up.

Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! Beats Sheet. The best way to not overly plan out your novel, but still get to where you're going.

November

My goal for my finished piece is going to be around 80,000 words, but for November I am going to shoot for a draft of 50,000 and to get the overall shape of the story down. Unfortunately, I'm starting the month with a serious problem with my hands, so my first couple of days are already going to be unproductive. But I'm going to update my word count every day, and hopefully I'll make it to 50,000 by the end of this month. Just need to do some catching up!