Giving in to the NaNo crowd. Sort of.
I have been vocal about my general lack of interest in NaNoWriMo. I understand what it tries to do on many levels, and I commend it for what it’s done for writers with brutal self-editing tendencies. But I’ve never been the least bit interested in trying to cram a monumental effort into under a month. I had, after all, already finished a novel. A shitty novel. My problem did not seem to be finishing things, just making them worthy of seeing sunlight.
Of course, I am now eating my words as I trawl through real college and juggle homework with video game addictions and other such writing-delaying nonsense. The fact of the matter is, I haven’t written in a goddamn age. And I don’t really have a fandom anymore to pretend I’m writing for. So it’s original or bust.
The problem is, all my original works are nascent novels, barely out of the note taking stage. I find myself increasingly frustrated by the process of worldbuilding, having yet to devise a method that works for me personally. I tried filling in details notebook style into OneNote, but as soon as I open it and stare into the maw of those blank pages, the effort becomes soul crushing and I decide, fuck this, I’m going to replay dragon age for the ten thousandth time.
In doing so, nothing gets done, which is the whole point of worldbuilding. Get it done, get it out of the way, have it as a resource while crafting your exquisite narrative. If something ever called for the “Just sit your goddamn ass down and write” sort of sentiment that NaNo is all about, it would be this.
So I’ve taken up a similar sort of deal. I am not confined to a month by any stretch of the imagination, but there are time limits still. The goal is to worldbuild my novel in the same way that I built a world for an A/U fanfiction project: side-stories. About chapter four into the fanfic, I decided to give my readers at the time some backstory, but I didn’t want to clunk it into the narrative all italicized like an idiot. Solution? Short story that takes place well out of the main narrative, but still within the universe. They ate it up. It thickened and added incredible dimension to the project itself. Characters that I did side-stories for started to steal more plot spotlight than they deserved because they suddenly got interesting.
For fourteen weeks until my summer vacation, I have to write 14 stories. One a week, all of them in the universe of Hellfire Codex. At least five pages each, and they all have to be different moments in time. The more variety in character focus and point of view, the better. The goal is to get to know these characters and the world in the best way I learned how- to actually write them and thus humanize them.
Wish me luck.