Introduction to Planning a Novel

It's October. Just a little under a month away from National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I figured it would be the best time to do this kind of post. It's a planning post, kind of. It's more like an overview of what I'm planning on posting this month. Since it is close to NaNoWriMo, I've decided to do a planning series where it goes through basic points of planning.

What is planning in a novel? It's where you figure out what your novel is going to be about, your characters, and your setting. It's simple. There are various ways to go about planning, but these are some of the key things that are consistent for me when I plan.

Things I plan on covering:

• World Building. World building is essential to a lot of writing even in contemporary settings. You've got to know key/important places and why they are important. 

• Character Building. This is also important since characters are kind of needed to tell a story, whether it be human or non-human. You've got to have some kind of information down about them.

• Plotting and Outlining. I'm a huge supporter of outlining. It's a good way to track what you are doing in your story. My reasons are in a different post that I will link HERE.

Unfortunately, there are only enough weeks in the month for three more posts but these are the bare essentials for planning a novel. Especially if you writing for NaNoWriMo. It's easy to lose motivation during the month it's best to know where you are going with your novel. 

But the one thing you need is an idea. You've got to start somewhere. If you don't have an idea then you need to get one. How you go about getting ideas for novels/stories is up to you. I can't tell you how to generate your ideas as they vary from person to person. Do some exploration, you'll find something to write about.

Keeping Up with 750 words

This week was a bit tricky. My work hours make it a bit harder for me to fit in my writing time and with my class starting on Monday, it's going to make it even harder. 750 words a day becomes hard. Though I managed to keep up with it on top of the things I had to do for work.

I can't say how many words I wrote for this week, but as of right now my monthly total stands at 30,121 words. With editing, I clocked in my 10 hours for the month. Now, I'm going to prepare to work on it in February. I need to print everything out.

As far as reading goes, I'm not doing too well in that department. The book I picked isn't really holding my interest which isn't good. I'm going to push myself through it to see how it goes.
There is a whole list of books I want to read this year and I'm stuck on the first one.

Overall, it was a pretty good week.

Progress Update: Slacking

This week hasn't been a good week. So far, I only have 11.75 hours of editing and that isn't including today. Hopefully I'll get that count up soon.

My current novel is kicking my butt. I'm basically rewriting the whole thing and that's where it's dragging me down a bit. My new plot line keeps changing, not in a bad way, I just keep adding things. That's what I get for not giving myself room to move things around so I have to track my scenes a bit differently than I usually do. Maybe I should bust out my index cards but that motivation just isn't there.

I did read through my Hourglass series though and started marking places that need to be changed. I just needed something different to read. I won't be editing the Hourglass series until later but it will happen this year hopefully.

I'm hoping this week will be a better week. My goal is 10 hours of editing. That's all I want to get in. It is possible if I stop being so lazy.