I was talking with a first-time Nano-novelist and first-novelist about her experience this year. She said she keeps running into a brick wall when it comes to plot. This is probably one of the most common problems a novelist faces, during NaNoWriMo or any other time. Every successful novelist has ways to deal with this problem. One method is to plan your novel in advance. The Snowflake method can be used for this. While this might be a great method for plotting, it’s not going to help you mid-November when you’re facing a 50,000 word deadline by the end of November. Snowflaking takes time. Right now you don’t have it.
So, what do you do?
Stop trying to tackle the plot of the whole novel. It’s going to overwhelm you. Stop questioning – would this really happen? Is this believable? Questioning is only going to slow you down. Right now you need to move forward.
Write the scenes you know you want to happen. No the whole plot. Just the scenes. Don’t worry about writing them in order either. Most of us have scenes in mind that we know we want in the novel, but these are sometimes middle scenes or even end scenes and we feel like we need to start writing the novel from the beginning and work our way to those scenes. But that can slow us down because we get hung up on the transitions and filling in all the scenes.
Instead, write a scene you know you’re going to want in the story. That will give you some word count. Then think about what scene you need to write to lead to that scene. Then think about where it goes to. Then work back and forth from those scenes. You’ll be surprised how often writing one scene will give you ideas for others. It won’t only give you more word count but it may actually lead the way to a whole novel.
