Pre-Write

Writing 50,000 words in a month isn't hard, but it's guaranteed that in those 50,000 words, more than half of them will be unusable. I'm trying something different this year and doing a NaNo pre-write totally about 20,000 then writing the full 50,000 during November. It's kind of like an extended outline, since formal outlines are really easy to break.

I started writing last month when I realized this story should be more than 50,000 words long, but I didn't want to cram all of them into the month of November and essentially "nano it up." I'm cheating in more ways that one: technically, this is the same story I wrote for last year's NaNo, but with a few tweaks. Starting early, even if I keep none of it, allows me to flesh out characters that are a little one-dimensional right now, and plan longer scenes which I'd rather write during the editing process. Basically, I'm doing a skeleton draft that's a lot of dialogue and not much else. I've found this the easiest way to start a piece of writing, especially since I usually start with characters.