Packing for Camp (NaNoWriMo)

As mentioned earlier, April marks another month of Camp NaNoWriMo, and I’m not feeling super ready for it. A week and a half isn’t a lot of time for a 50k word race to the finish line and I’m starting to sweat a little bit. I only just settled on a project two days ago and, while it’s a second draft so I already have some groundwork there, I’m not at all confident that makes me any more ready. I haven’t read the thing since I finished the first draft years ago. I honestly couldn’t even remember the main characters’ names until I went back and read my description from the NaNo session wherein I wrote the first draft. It’s, uh… it’s been a while. So I have no clue what needs working on and no idea how to go about that work.

Sounds like a normal NaNo month for me, right?

I’m really not alone in this position, I’m sure. Writers—especially the ones that willingly do these madcap month-long stress-bombs—generally fall into three camps along the writer spectrum.

Plotters have got it all planned out. They have the timelines of important events, the world encyclopedias detailing the minutiae of the natural, social, and political climates, the comprehensive character profiles with everything from childhood traumas to eye colors to favorite breakfast foods. This is all on top of a color-coded blow-by-blow diagram of all the events within the story undertaken by every single character. I’ve approached drafts like this before, and it is so nice having it all planned out. But I was also tragically born with the brain of a squirrel. In addition to an unreasonable love of almonds, I also have basically no attention span. Once I know the story’s end, I lose interest. (This is probably also what makes editing so hard for me.) Also, my stories have a tendency to wander from the nice, neat water channels I’ve crafted for them and flow all over the countryside. So straight plotting doesn’t work the best for me.

Pantsers don’t go in for all that preparing business. Booooring! It’s way more interesting to dive into a project with absolutely no idea where it’s going. Imagine a vacation where you go to the airport and jump on the first flight you stumble across without even looking at the destination. Fun, right?? Buuut it’s hard to know what to pack. Or what language to study. Etc. True pantsing can be really fun, but it’s also risky and you’re basically guaranteeing yourself a ton of editing on the back end. I’ve had stories that I dove into with no idea where they were going, only to discover that they were going absolutely nowhere. And when you’re on a timeline, whether your deadlines are externally mandated or self-imposed, not knowing where the story is heading can be pretty stressful. Pantsing can be great, but again, I don’t cleanly fall into this category either.

Plantsers are the hybridized Frankenstein monsters of the writing world and I am definitely one of them. I’d wager that most writers are, falling somewhere between the two extremes of pure plotters and absolute pantsers. Plantsers take the best of both worlds and weld them together into their own janky story tanks to plow through the project in.

When I’m planning a totally new project, I usually give myself a rough outline, with a little more detail toward the start of things, but neglect to fill in the last couple chapters at all. This gives me the freedom to let the conclusion evolve more naturally throughout the story and gives my little squirrel brain something to chew on all the way to the end.

But this month is going to be a little different, because I’m not writing a totally new project. I’m editing a story I’ve already written, but more or less forgotten. So it’s time to figure out how I’m going to tackle this tiger.

First, I have to reread the thing. Reading (while taking detailed notes, of course!) it will give me a sense of what needs doing. Refining the magic system, finding all the foreshadowing that ending up foreshadowing nothing at all, remembering the bits that came out of nowhere, etc., will all become apparent once I’ve given it a read.

Once I’ve read through the book, organizing my to-do notes chronologically through the book will be easy. I’ll know what hints need to be placed earlier and have a sense of where I can start seeding them. I’ll figure out what needs deleting. I’ll understand the plot points that need a better lead up, the characters that need a stronger arc, and the bits that need more research for historical accuracy. And I’ll have a better sense of the hundred other problems that I’m not aware of yet but are surely there.

By the time I get this far, I doubt I’ll have much time left before the start of the month (assuming I have any at all, haha), but I’ll feel a lot better about it. The thing is, I’ve never really been uncomfortable straying from my writing plans. It’s gonna happen, no question about it. But I’ll know my story better by then, and just by virtue of that fact, I’ll be able to shape it better moving forward.

How about you fine readers? What degree of preparation do you like to achieve before starting a project? Do you have any projects coming up? I’d love to chat about it in the comments!

And until next week, happy writing!