My Version of NaNoWritMo

I’ve always been a little jealous of writers who participate in NaNoWritMo – National Novel Writing Month. Writing a novel in a month! A collective word count of 3,288,976,325 for 2012 alone! But my writing process follows a different path, and NaNoWri Mo hasn’t “fit” with it yet.

Then I heard about the inaugural PiBoIdMo – Picture Book Idea Month. Created by author Tara Lazar, PiBoIdMo is a 30-day challenge for picture book writers. Tara’s idea is “to create 30 picture book ideas in 30 days. You don’t have to write a manuscript (but you can if the mood strikes). You don’t need potential best-seller ideas.”

I’m not a picture book writer, but I liked the idea of creating story concepts, and decided to write a novel concept a day for the month of November. The experience has been enlightening.

Here’s what I learned:

1. I became more aware of the world around me, and I searched for story concepts wherever I went, whatever I did. I’m always collecting snippets, for example, an outfit of someone I see on the subway might appear on one of my characters in my work-in-progress. But this awareness of the world became heightened as I felt the pressure to write a concept a day, resulting in a fresh inflow of ideas.
2. I became more practised in the art of defining a story concept in one-sentence – with a setup, confrontation and resolution. My novel concepts each day were not always complete. Sometimes, I would have only a setup or only a character with no discernible action for her to take. But over the days, some of those concepts became more complete and polished.
3. I found myself revisiting themes over the month, exploring a similar story concept from different angles and approaches, even using different genres (contemporary realistic and fantastical) for the same concept. As a result, I felt I explored more thoroughly what would be the best story concept for a particular theme that I wanted to write about. I think this will make my future novels stronger, since I’ll have a more considered story concept from the start.
4. I remembered how to “play” with my story concepts, having fun with absurd story concepts as well as sensible ones.

My conclusion? I will do it again next November. Because envisioning a story concept is an important skill to practise. Because playing with story concepts is fun and enlightening. Because I emerged with two solid story concepts that I plan to write one day.

I look forward to NoCoWriMo – Novel Concept Writing Month – next year! Maybe you’ll join me?