Good Morning Everyone! I hope your middle of the week is going well. Today I want to chat about two things. NaNoWriMo and my book in progress Shadow Life.
NaNoWriMo starts up in November and is just around the corner. A few years ago a writer in our writing group told us about it. I had never heard of it and so she shared some information. In it’s most basic explanation you dedicate the month of November to just start writing, without going back and editing or worry about anything. Let if flow, see where it goes, and how many words you get in. Today there’s a website where you can sign up and share the experience with others. Back then I didn’t sign up, I just went with the general idea and this is when Shadow Life was born. If you are interested in NaNoWriMo you can learn more by clicking HERE.
Writing just free willy nilly was both exciting and fun. No real rules, no expectations on grammar or spelling, and no outline. I quickly found a comfortable voice for my character and decided to try out first person point of view. Many of the writers in our group wrote in this POV and it was something of a challenge. Trying not to use the word I too much is hard to do, and only being able to show things that your character can see felt confining. But with NaNoWriMo, if I tried and failed, or tried and succeeded, at least I tried.
Surprising to me, my efforts turned out to be something I wanted to consider finishing one day. With November creeping up on us I am seriously considering taking another month to see where it goes.
After November ended and I looked back at what I had created, I noticed a few things. Without an outline I’ve written myself into a corner. The ending, that existed in my mind wouldn’t work, and to try to work this into what I already had, made the outcome way to complicated. Now I find myself wondering where to go next. Also, I shared some of it with my writing peeps and a common piece of feedback was my main character was too passive.
With all of my books, I’ve created skeleton outlines, and then went back later to write up the back cover summary, and found that it was really hard. After I stopped writing the book at the end of November I decided to try something new. Something I probably should do with all of my books. Write the back cover summary first, not last, and use that as a guide. Below, you will find what I came up with. It will have to be edited of course but it was my first try.
Shadow Life is a young adult paranormal novel about a young girl who’s haunted by ghosts. When she suffers an accidental death, she wakes up in an identical version of our world–although many things are different and not in a good way– and realizes that ghosts are not ghosts at all but shadows of ourselves bleeding into our world. Desperately wanting to find her way back to her friends, and especially to her dimension jumping boyfriend, she hopes that they can find her before it’s too late.
Later, as I tried to plot out more to the story, I came up with another sentence that I wanted to add to this summary somehow. It is a pretty big twist in the story and needs to fit in there.
But when she finds her dead father trapped in this strange world with her she learns that in order to save his life she has to kill him first.
What do you think? Should I try to continue this when NaNoWriMo starts? If you are a writer, I challenge you to jump in too and explore where the experience can lead you.
Can Jasmine escape the Shadow World or will she be lost forever?