I highly recommend the use of an outline for National Novel Writing Month.

Of course I haven't yet written one myself... but, um, I plan to!

So I thought I'd share my NaNoWriMo warmup exercise with you. In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I've outlines how to write a novel outline in 2 days.

This isn't your usual novel outline. You'd normally take a month or so to do that properly (say using the Snow Flake method). But this should be enough to keep you on-track during NaNoWriMo

1. Summary: (10 minutes)

I'm a huge advocate of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Last year I wrote a 50,000 word rough draft of The Gate during the month of November.

What is NaNoWriMo?

From the NaNoWriMo website, the official description is:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

In the last week or so, I’ve written about 8,000 words on The Gate. Partly this was jump started by my having nailed Fiona’s underlying character motivation. But more importantly, I belatedly realised that the reason I’ve stalled on The Gate lately isn’t just because I’ve been madly scribbling away to get a pile of short fiction pieces submitted around the country, but because I haven’t been reading.

Well it seems obvious in retrospect, but I can’t remember the last time I sat down and read a book. Three months ago? Four?

A friend introduced me to the idea of honesty in writing. To be perfectly “honest”, at first I didn’t know what he meant. He suggested that it was about simply saying what you mean and not trying to be too pretentious or clever. The discussion arose around the writing of Salley Vickers, whom I haven’t read. Apparently her work is straightforward, enjoyable, and accessible, yet sophisticated at the same time.

I've been struggle with one of my primary characters in the Gate. From feedback I received when I posted the first chapters over at Critique Circle, I knew I had to flesh out my character more. For several months I have been trying to get to get to the bottom of the character using character templates, questionnaires, and the like. But nothing would get to the bottom of this character for me. That is until I discovered certain very useful archetypes that deal with underlying motivations.

Entries for the ABC Radio short story competition
are due at the end of next week.

I entered last year after discovering this competition a week before the deadline. I submitted "Vanilla", which was the only story I had that was complete and met the word count. It wasn't really appropriate (it's a bit raunchy), but it's funny and fresh. I'm not surprised that it wasn't chosen.

This year I started thinking about the competition two months in advance.