I hope all of you doing NaNoWriMo had a productive first four days! I did, although I can feel things slowing down a bit as I head into the middle of the book. Middles are usually the murky part for me, so I slow down as I try to figure out what’s supposed to happen. But I’m currently at 12,502 words, so I’m very happy that I’ve gotten ahead. I usually do start out getting ahead and then slow down later in the month.
One thing that helped me get ahead was that I knew what I needed to write for these early scenes. I’ve always been a complete pantser (meaning I wrote with no outline and no real idea of what would happen). I’m still a bit of a pantser, but I’ve learned how to make outlining work for me. I don’t outline the entire book and I don’t make myself stick strictly to it, I can change my mind when the need arises (I’ve already changed my mind on some things in this book). But for the first few scenes, I knew exactly what needed to happen and so I wrote very general outlines on the index cards in Scrivener. Such as, “Josh & Sailor come home” and “Josh & Mara are reunited” and “Josh & Sailor tell the others about what happened.” This is the final Swans Landing book, so it takes place about two months after the end of Submerging. The beginning was pretty easy since it would follow the events of the end of Submerging and be built out of that. Now I’m getting into the parts where the characters have been reunited, everyone who wasn’t present in book two now knows what happened, and so the book is flowing into its own storyline and new events.
For the rest of the book, I know the major events that need to happen and have the general outlines for them written in Scrivener, but I’ll fill in the scenes between those events as I write. Hopefully, the next 37,498+ words won’t be too difficult!
If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, how did you do?