NaNoWriMo month (and your ideas for a story)

I can't believe nobody's brought up Na No Wri Mo yet. In case you're wondering, Na No Wri Mo is a writing contest — write up a novel of 50,000 words from the start to end of November. Here's the official site.

I have done this once before (I wrote a ode-to-crime university story that woefully came out like a hackneyed string of words). Now I am going to write a romance set within Brazil's wonderful favelas. I hope my imagination can manage.

In any event, all discussion for National Novel Writing Month 2010 goes here.

is u tryin to steel teh ideaz fur ur storee

I would probably just write general nonsense for this anyway.

I'm going to do it this time, finally. I've been chickening out for years. This year however, I am kinda stuck with the novel I'm trying to write, so I've taken a one-month break, so I might as well get my nanowrimo on.

BK.

Is easier than it seems. Trust me. Averaging 1,667 words a day is no chore.

Oh, wow. Only a few days away now. I think that, at this point, I'm going to plunge straight in without any outline. I have a basic story idea, and it will hopefully come out okay readable in the end.

Might try this, but I doubt I'll reach the expectation.

I'm too busy to do all 50,000, so I'm going for a more managable 5000

Lookit me, a high school freshman bombarded with homework actually trying to do it!

I'm just going cheat and continue my current novel take the opportunity to write a more refined version of what I've done and go from there.

I wasn't planning to do it this year, as my best record in the past three years is 10,000... but I was honorably challenged to a duel by a friend, which I accepted on the condition that the 50,000 words don't all have to go toward the same work  ^*

Result: If you actually see me here during November, yell at me to get back to work.

I was thinking of doing my time traveling cyborg romance novel, but I've completed Na No Wri Mo twice and am now content to rest on my laurels.

That idea is fair game as far as I'm concerned, so feel free to use it. It's a cute, angsty cyborg teenager from the future who accidentally travels back in time and falls in love with a human girl and then has to evade his father, who probably falls in love with the girl's single mother. Also the cyborgs have super strength and super computer hacking skills.

I always fail miserably due to school. XD Each year I take the same characters and try to tweak it into a different story since obviously the previous one didn't pan out. :P

This year I have something really weird, though... My MC, Saunder, saw his idol/hero/big-sis-type seal away an Elder God of sorts. Problem is half her soul sealed it, and half of it, due to him not wanting her to go away, got stuck in him. And she was undead to begin with so now her undead, soulless body is traipsing around being a mostly mindless, mostly destructive vessel of raw creative energy.

...I'm not sure where I'm going yet after that, except Saunder is going insane. And I'm not sure if it's because somewhere in there he got Elder God cooties or if it's because he has part of a paladin's soul mucking things up. Or both.

There's going to be a lot of unreliable narration.

And it's IN SPACE. With humans as a conquered species in a fairly benevolent Combine.

edited 27th Oct '10 8:53:04 PM by Bur

I'll be cheating at continuing my 15,000 words of Est Machina. However, that is far more manageable with my hellish schedule.

Y'know that magical girl thing that I've plugged to death? Yeah, that's what I'm doin'.

I've been thinking of a story dealing with humanity's subconscious primal terror concerning our grasp of infinite spaces.

My class is forcing me to participate in this (she told us anyone who didn't think they could do it should drop right up front, so I have no excuse), so I'm doing the virtual reality world idea I talked about a couple months ago.

It's totally not The Matrix. I'm trying really hard to keep it separate. Actually, the finale is kind of reminding me of Inception right now. Glaringly obvious metaphors like fortresses will do that.

I'm doing the prequel to my last year's, after it became more and more clear that I was telling the middle of a story in which the beginning really needed to be told. Oh, and the world has developed substantially since last year, so ...

Anyway. Setting reminiscent of c.1900-1910 in our world. Steamships. Railways. Dreadnoughts. Rifles. However, this is a post-apocalyptic world; about two thousand years ago, there was an event that changed reality itself. Things that we would consider magic are possible in this world, since that point. Remnants of the high-tech world of the Time Before still remain, though — wreckage, mostly, but here and there, enough to build upon. They have been.

The culture that most of my characters come from is that. Reconstructionists. They aim to recapture the glories of the Time Before, and are not necessarily that aware that this is now impossible; the very laws of reality differ from then.

Against them, the cultures of the New Way, who embrace the new magic and shun the technology of those former times, considering anything that smacks of the Time Before a risk of causing another cataclysm — because, it seems, whatever did it was done by humans, and probably in war.

Neither is right, of course. It's human nature, not technology, that made the cataclysmic event happen, and doing it again is probably just as easy with the new was with the old. However, recreating lost glories of the past is fruitless, too.

edited 28th Oct '10 12:31:03 AM by Morven

Tried last year, but only got 17,400 words due to stopping partway through and not starting again. I'm planning on doing a story idea I recently posted about here this year, but I still haven't got most of the plot worked out. I can't even think of a climax to work toward.

(Vaguely related: Why is it that whenever I see a web page on thinking up characters that includes a bunch of questions about the character, anything from name to birthday to favorite food to childhood memories, my first answer to them is always "how should I know?")

I find character sheets to be vaguely depressing and unproductive, but my general answer to any of those is, that when I know the character well enough, they will tell me those answers.

Anhelia was born in winter, for dramatic effect. She can no longer eat any of her favorite foods, ever again. Childhood memories — I could write a book on it. I probably will.

I'm thinking a comedy/slice of life story about a private school full of ugly boys going coed with a school full of beautiful girls. Hilarity will ensue.

Just an idea. I don't even have the first chapter done, but still.

edited 28th Oct '10 9:08:08 AM by Tidal_Wave_17

I'm attempting this for the second year. Last year I only reached 22,170 but I started late and had not a CLUE what I was in for. This year I'm ready, except for one thing. I don't know what to write! I have two choices but keep waffling back and forth on which story to go with.

I can either finish last year's novel about a boy, his dog and his best friend and what goes on during a year in their lives in NE, OR I can start my story about working for Karma. I hate to leave the first book unfinished but at the same time I'd like to work on the new one. Any ideas?

I'll be doing it, not sure if I want to do an original story or a small part of a planned novel that i was going to break u pinto separate "books" anyway.

I feel this is as good a time as any to start my kinda sorta Civil War novel.

Is fanfiction allowed? I was thinking of doing a Drowtales/SRW crossover story. It starts with the Argama being sent to the Drowtales world through a space-warp. There will be a lot of discussion on the culture clash between humans and Drow. A war will eventually erupt between the two planets, fought with robots and golems. The story should have a lot of anime series involved. Maybe I should have thought this out more.

Yes — fanfiction is allowed. (What matters for them is that you churn out words.)

edited 28th Oct '10 3:47:38 PM by QQQQQ

It could be 50k words of haiku for all they care.