Sunday, October 31, 2010

ideas to writing

For the NaNoWriMo, I'll be using the index card system Robert Olen Butler talks about in his book, From Where You Dream. Butler - whose writing process seems to be quite similar to me - ie. pretty organic - advocates writing a phrase or even a word on an index card to indicate to you the progress of scenes throughout the novel. So, for example, my index cards for the first bit of Summer of Gatsby (or whatever the damn title is going to be!) might read something like this:
heartbreak
reading
meeting Arachne, the Wizard, Edge and Nick
the couch scene
The Great Gatsby

Meaningless to anyone but me, really. But what the index cards do is to remind you where you're potentially going. It's easy to shuffle the order around. It's not as prescriptive as an outline - and anyway, if I write an outline I feel as though I've written the actual novel and don't bother.

I'll also keep a notebook - hopefully more rigorously than last time, because I want to keep a record of characters and snippets of dialogue etc. Also tarot readings as Arachne is into the tarot. Plus phrases that come to mind, because I'm interested in trying, despite the word count pressure, to create a lyrical piece of writing.

Tonight in preparation for NaNoWriMo I'll be
a) finding the spare index cards
b) writing out character notes in the special notebook
c) filling in some of the index cards
e) spinning some fleece - oops, how did that sneak in there?

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