NaNoWriMo

You don’t have to be writing long before you hear about an annual event called NaNoWriMo. Short for National Novel Writing Month, the US based organisation to promote creative writing holds this event every November. The idea is to write 50,000 words in one month, resulting in a draft of a novel.

As you can imagine, this is no mean feat! Those who follow me on social media will know how much I celebrate getting 50 words down some days, let alone the average of 1,600 every day which NaNo demands.

However, this year, I’m going to have a go.

Unfortunately, you can’t sit down on 1st November and bash out a couple of thousand words without some planning behind you. As a pantser (make it up as I go along), this is counter-intuitive. My books have a beginning and an end, but what happens in the middle is a total mystery until I start to write, which is why some days can be a real struggle.

So, I am doing something completely alien and plotting out the entire novel from start to finish. I am getting quite excited by it, despite my aversion.

I love fantasy, so it wouldn’t be my story if it didn’t have a splash of magic in it, but instead of writing a coming of age, or a hero’s quest epic, I have decided to write a cosy mystery.

For those of you that don’t know, the term cosy means exactly what it sounds like. A warm comfortable read without blood, gore, or sex, meaning you can go to bed with the lights off and not worry about nightmares. Think along the lines of Miss Marple or Midsomer Murders.

I have been mulling over the idea for a while. Last year, I attended a Crime Writers summit online, and really took to the idea of creating my own series. With the help of some crib sheets I downloaded from the event, I am starting to flesh out my closed community and my two amateur detectives.

Of course, my brain didn’t come up with these lovely ideas when I was sitting at my desk. Instead, I lay awake at some silly time of the morning, creating likely characters and scenarios in my head. In the end, I had to get up and write it all down so I could go to sleep!

So far, Maisie Lemmon will beg Wilfred H Bunion to help her prove that her friend’s death wasn’t accidental. I love writing character-based stories, so it has been easy to come up with my sleuths.

However, mysteries are plot-driven with red herrings and blind alleys. That demands some thought and planning.

Along with the rewrites I need to make for my next novel, The Infilling, I’m going to have a busy October ahead of me!

Obviously, I won’t have a complete story by the 31st of November, but it will be a great basis to build on. I will probably need to go through a lot of revising and rewriting before it is ready to be read, let alone published. If the process works, however, and I get a good story out of it, there is nothing to stop me from repeating the process for subsequent books.

Maisie is rubbing her hands and smiling. She is quite keen to solve more mysteries.

If, like me, you haven’t tried NaNo yet, there is plenty of time to make a plan. You never know. It might end up as a best-seller!