Writing Twelve Books in One Month
As NaNoWriMo draws closer, it's time to declare what projects all of us writers will be working on this year.
For those who don't know what NaNoWriMo is, to put it simply, writers have the whole month of November to write a 50,000-word draft of a novel. Thirty days to write 50,000 words. This challenge forces writers like me to take the time out of our day to sit down and write a book. I do it because I'm proving to myself that I can write a lot in a short amount of time if I sit down, do it, and do not make excuses not to.
This year will be my eighth NaNoWriMo, and hopefully, my sixth win in a row if I make it to the 50,000-word goal again. But this year, I'll be doing things a little bit differently. In the past, I've tried writing out the full first draft of a novel within the month as the challenge dictates, and I've never finished the first draft. This time I'm going to be doing a zero draft.
If you don't know what a zero draft is, don't worry. I didn't either until two months ago. Essentially a zero draft is a long outline of your novel. You don't try to add any description or fluff or worldbuilding. You tell what's happening in the story, point blank.
For example:
Allie goes to the market to buy fish. While at the market, she encounters a wizard selling gold beans, and she trades her money for the beans.
Boom! You're done telling part of the story.
You can write the whole novel this way and separate it into chapters as you go. You can add the pieces of dialogue you want where they're supposed to go. You can put "Add an explanation of air magic" as a placeholder for the future. The whole point of this draft is to say what happens, and you make it fancy and flashy later. So far, I've been finishing more initial drafts with this method than just writing everything out, and it's been very helpful to my writing process. I don't get stuck with my Virgo perfectionism to make it the best. I end up focusing on making sure it is there so I can fix it later.
So during this Nanowrimo, I'm going to be zero drafting an entire book series with this method. Twelve books in total, which will hopefully amount to 50,00 words by the end. It sounds very daunting, and it is, but I've been preparing for this all Preptober, which is just October for my NaNoWriMo newbies.
I have this series idea that I've been super excited to write. It's a buddy cop meets fantasy mystery meets husband-wife partnership sort of deal. I've got a lot of details nailed out for each book in this series, but I was compelled to write them all so I can leave breadcrumbs for the finale throughout the series. The series is planned out where some of the later books act as a flashback to how everything started for our characters. So writing the whole series at once will let me see my main characters' past, present, and future all at once.
It's a very ambitious idea for NaNoWriMo, but after eight years of doing it, I needed something to help spice it up for me. Not to mention, my Pinterest board is filled with ideas for this series, so I don't think I could hold myself back from starting to plan out the other books in this series if I just focused on the first one.
Overall, I'm very excited about this NaNoWriMo, and I'll be trying to track my progress here, and on Instagram so I have something to look back at in the future.
If you're interested in being writing buddies, go and find me on the NaNoWriMo site: https://nanowrimo.org/participants/thediaryofanauthorintraining
