We have already reached halfway through our preparation month for NaNoWriMo!
In less than fifteen short days, we will be on our way to challenging ourselves with writing a manuscript. The recent sun has been invigorating, especially given that it is following midterms.
Prompt series No. 3
Lex Miller | Argonaut
- What is your main character’s favorite type of weather and why?
- Imagine your character going through your daily routine. How would they react? What would they do?
- Give your character’s best friend a secret that your character doesn’t know about.
- What are the buildings made out of in the place where your character lives? Describe the architecture.
- Are there any animals where your character lives? If you are writing realistic fiction, brainstorm a few ideas for what types of animals you could incorporate. If you are writing fantasy, invent a new type of wild animal and give your character a strong opinion about said animal.
- What is your character always willing to argue about?
- How does your character calm down?
Inspiration and updates from an aspiring author
Sometimes, you need to completely change the premise of your story. Not necessarily because there was anything wrong with the original premise, but because another premise seems more interesting.
I’ve decided to tweak my premise. I may even make the University of Idaho’s Moscow campus the setting of the story.
Instead of my main character being a young girl, I want to write about a college student.
She will still get lost in some variety of woods and return with some sort of magic power, but instead of returning to “modern life,” she will return to dorms, midterms and all the responsibilities she wasn’t able to take care of while she was missing.
My main character will be missing for a week — long enough for people to worry and for her to get behind, but not long enough for her to be in significant danger of failing classes. She will wander back on campus on foot, looking haggard and confused.
I have yet to flesh out my character’s friends in more detail, but I would like her to have a best friend and a few circles that she interacts with. Since I haven’t decided on my character’s interests, I don’t know which circles they would be involved in.
This week, since midterms are over and I will, hopefully, have more time to concentrate on planning my novel. I want to focus on fleshing out plot ideas and the characterization of my narrator.
So far, I have planned no plot outside of the basic premise of my novel. I want to plan out a few chapter ideas so that I will have ideas about what to write when the inevitable bout of writers’ block hits this November.
In the meantime, I hope you all are enjoying your October. We’re almost there, just keep planning — we’ll be writing novels in no time.