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.

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.