OK I am officially starting prep for NaNo, I fully intend to have another win seeing as my last one was 3 years ago and I haven’t tried since.
I’m not a tidy writer, I’m one of those people who spends months scrawling down odd ideas and then after picking one writes an entire book full of history, plans, speech patterns,stuff like that before sitting down to actually write. I end up surrounded by scraps of paper with one line or a conversation written on them. I also write like a script writer, I have an idea, I outline it then I do a step by step break down of it an act by act break down and finally a chapter by chapter outline. It might sound tedious but it helps me keep the idea straight and actually make sence. it stops me from going off on a tangent when a character says something that could lead to another story, which I do a lot…, and it means that I can really spend time making a plot feel real, you know for a work of fiction which does mean automatically not real!
The down side to this is that I spend a lot of time getting to know my characters, how they think, what they eat, how they fuck, who their secret crush is, who they wish they had said “I love you” to (Sabest always wished he had told C’rert he loved him before he died because no one should ever die feeling so alone… ahem let’s get away from Sunrise of the Bloodtime because I am definitely not going to try to salvage that again!) so when I have to kill them off or break their hearts it makes ME upset and I know that it is for the greater good of the beast called plot. However my muse? She likes to make me cry, she really does, she’s the one who got me to murder one of the characters in my thesis film when he had done nothing wrong and had already had everyone else having a go at him and beating him up.
