nanowrimo_lj | I know what I'm going to write!

And it's not what I've been mulling over for the past year. Last October I heard about Nanowrimo and began seriously fleshing out an idea I'd been kicking around for ages. Then I started thinking about another idea, but because I had planned the first one so thoroughly I set the the new one on the back burner and labeled it, "Next Year." I've put in time all year on this idea, because it's a fantasy story, something I've never really worked on for a lengthy period of time. I've been making notes, and drawings, and character sheets. There are still a lot of things I need to figure out for it, but I thought, well, I still have a month.

But I just recently started reading No Plot? No Problem!, and it's made me re-evaluate how I'm approaching this. And last night on the train, it hit me. (An idea, not the train.) I'm not going to write about the story, the characters that have been brewing in my head for over a year. I've already planned it too much. Yes, it's a story I want to tell, but having everything planned from start to finish made it kind of difficult last year when I started to go crazy in Weeks 2 and 3. I got bored trying to get my characters from point to point, bored writing the in-between scenes that are necessary but not always the most exciting to write.

So I'm setting aside what I've been planning so carefully. And I'm going to write about the guy who sells me sandwiches. I've been making up stories about this salad/sandwich place near my job for ages. I have all these theories about the people who work there, and every so often I work up the nerve to ask them something. (I do go there every other day, after all. Apparently they call me "the lady." Not sure how I feel about that.) I'm fascinated by these people, this place, by the family that I'm convinced runs it. So I'm going to take this spark of an idea and run with it. It was an epiphany of James Joyce-ian proportions, and it grabbed me while I sat on the subway at 10pm. It was liberating, and eye-opening, and it's been there all along. So I know what I'm going to write, but not exactly what I'm going to write, and instead of being terrifying it feels wonderful.

This is my second year doing NaNoWriMo. The novel I wrote last year is 50,000+ words, but the story is nowhere near complete. I didn't even start editing it until the end of this summer. (It took that long for me to be able to even look at it again.) I'm 22, I work at a bookstore, and I live in New York City. There's at least a handful of people at my store participating this year, and a lot of people know about it. This is good, because in a store full of writers, actors, artists, and musicians, everyone is very supportive of the creative exploits of their coworkers.

That said, I now need to go get ready for work.