Writing about writing

Preparing and writing notes

Grit your teeth, pull your hair,
Paint the walls black and scream, "Fuck the world”
         Missing You, All Time Low

It is the last day before NaNo begins, and I am beyond terrified. I think I have prepped in any way possible, but I still feel like a nervous wreck, wondering if I can make it through the month at all. I can see myself dying from caffeine poisoning or stress, just from looking at the schedule, who knows how hard it’s going to get once it actually begins? Then again, if I can make it through this, I’m pretty sure I can conquer the world, so that’s something.

So what exactly have I been doing to prep? Let’s have a look into my deranged notes and the way I make shit happen.

First off, I go open my drawer of random post it notes. These post its are filled with strange snippets, anything from sentences, quotes, random words, prompts, song lyrics, names, character traits, anything really. I go through them methodically, pick some out that seem to fit together, or might turn into something useful. Half of them is probably crap, but whatever I don’t end up using, goes straight back in the drawer. You never know, it might not be so crappy 30 years from now, or it might somewhere down the line, lead to something none-shitty. Either way it doesn’t take up all that much space, so it might as well go back to where it came from.

Then I ponder. And I can ponder a lot, just so you know. Usually I just flop down on my couch, lie there and stare up at the ceiling, glancing at the notes once in a while until I come up with something. I might not be able to stay in this “lying on the couch” state for all that long, sometimes I will have to remove myself to do other things, but that’s okay, I have notebooks and/or post its everywhere. This time, with “Murder Michael Mayhem”, I remember coming up with the title, sitting in a bus with one of my closest friends. Once I had that down, the brainstorming began.

The first thing I do when I brainstorm, is make a new document and do the whole “What If” kind of thing. In another document, I keep questions, like for instance: “Who wants to murder Michael?” and “Why do they want to murder him?”. These two documents combined, gives me a fuck-load of ideas, some remarkably better than others, but still, they are all there. I try to answer all the questions I have for myself, with “What if’s”, then jot down more questions, back and forth. I ended up with maybe 8 pages of what if’s, this time around, and there might just be some other stories hidden in there somewhere.

Now I’ve more or less got the basic idea for the story, and thus, it is time for more documents. I do everything in LibraOffice documents, partly because it’s free, partly because it’s easy. All I really need is words and an index feature, then I’m good to go. Anyways, I start at the very beginning, figuring out the narrative, the shape, what type of story it is, core word and stuff like that. If anyone wants to know more about core word(s), I highly recommend spending some time in the company of Scarlett Thomas and her book “Monkey’s with Typewriters”. Either that, or wait for me to get back to it at some point, because I most likely will.

I think this time around, I did the universe description next, because I wanted to do this whole cyberpunk/science fiction/high tech thing, I needed to get that down first. I had a pretty good idea of the story and characters, mind you, I needed to focus on where to put them. Since I was digging into the sci-fi genre, I decided to do a “scientific discoveries” document separately, just to make the world description less crowded.

Now in this science fiction universe, there is another race, different from humans yet not entirely so. These got their own document too, where I wrote down what they look like, what they can do, what they can’t do, how they work in general. Most importantly, I wrote down what they are, how they fit into the world, where they came from, that kind of thing. There’s a really big difference between what I did, and the average alien from outer space, but even if you’re doing that type of thing, you need to know where they came from, how they got there, and why!

Then there’s some very specific notes that only applies for this particular novel: I needed creative ways to commit murder, weapons to do it with, and how to get away with it, time and time again. So this got another document, and I spend almost an entire day getting this down. You get super weird when you write shit like that, by the way, and your search history will never be the same again.

Then came the character descriptions, and I have a quite long survey ready to do those, both for major and minor characters. This time around I only have two major characters, but it still took several days to get them all filled out and edited into something that made perfect sense.

Finally I’m ready to do the actual story line! I tried typing it out, and then I tried again, and again… And finally, I came to terms with the fact that I needed scene cards. I stumbled across this technique somewhere on the internet, and it’s actually really smart. You write down all the scenes you want, starting off with a title (that you can obviously change later on). Then you add a list of characters, that needs to be there, then a content note (what’s going to happen), and finally the grand question: WHY! The why is by far the most important part, because this is where you have to prove to yourself (and by extension your readers) why this scene is important. For instance it can be important character development, moving forth the plot, introducing a new character, tension building, that type of thing. Point is: it needs to be important. If you can remove the scene without it having any effect, you might as well do just that. I think I did a pretty decent job with “Murder Michael Mayhem”, I don’t think there’s any fluff-fillers for no apparent reason at least.

Once I had all my scenes down, all the stuff I simply could not live without including, I began shuffling them around, trying to find the best possible way for the story to fit together. It took a while, and the scene cards really helped, because sooner or later I got it. It came down to 26 chapters, which means I’ll more or less have to write a chapter a day, for me to get it done in November. But that’s okay, worst thing that can happen is that I fail horribly, and die as a result of it, because I am a extremely self-hating overachiever.

Then I basically just typed the scene cards back into the computer, re-read the whole notes document, added a few things, deleted some others, and that’s about it. That’s how I planned it out, and I just finished reading through the entire notes document this morning. I began October 4th, so nearly a month on planning alone. Then again, this will make my actual writing go a lot more smoothly, I don’t have to come up with something halfway at the finish line, I know how it starts, I know how it ends, and I know all the shit that goes in between.

Now I’m going to go read a fanfic, eat some cake, and continue stressing out about tomorrow.