I've been carrying this book around with me for a week, reading it between classes, on the bus ride home, or during lunchtime and it has some pretty great information that I thought I'd share. Something that particularily interested me was the chapter on novel planning. The particular situation presented in the chapter has happened to so many of us that I'm starting to wonder how planners are able to write and stick so closely to their outlines without it getting messy. I wish that I could be a planner, but most of the time my planning is minimal at best. I go into writing a new piece with limited knowledge of three things: Characters, Plot, and Setting. Then I write and let the story fill in the extra details itself. The only time I really get into outlining is during the re-write or revisions when I find it to be the most useful. In the excerpt below if you see the word Me in paretheses then that's a thought I had while reading.
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Pages 82, 83, 84 (this is a really small book)
After months of preparation, Jennifer McCreedy had an absolutely clear vision of how her intricate fantasy novel would unfurl.
"I churned out character biographies, world maps, and language keys," says the twenty-year-old one-time NaNoWriMo winner from Detroit. "I had developing culture, societies, religions, hierarchical class stuctures--even regional clothing, genetic wuirks, weapons, and customs."
When the month began, Jennifer dovein with all her notes at her side--and promptly stopped writing.
"I did so much development work on the novel that when it came time to actually write, I was horrified at what I was coming up with. I'd comitted too much to making a complete world for my novel just to watch it crumble under the needs of a November 30th deadline. So I set it aside for future work and started completely anew."
Jennifer's experience echoes the dismay of thousands of National Novel Writing Month participants who have brought months or years of novel ideas to the writing table and ended up finding them to be more of a hindrance than a help in getting something written.
It may be counterintuitive, but when it comes to novel writing, more preparation does not necessarily produce a better book. In fact, too much preparation has a way of stopping novel writing altogether.
