The Terror of Knowing

I feel as though every NaNoWriMo blog ought to include some kind of Ron Swanson gif and, since I seem to have unwittingly started some kind of pattern, I’ll somehow have to try to drop that in the middle of this summary of Week One’s progress.

As the graph below visually shows, I was doing splendidly until Day 6/Friday, at which point I started to fall behind. Considering I was away all of Saturday enjoying a catch up with friends in Manchester, I’m not altogether surprised by this falling behind, but I had hoped to compensate for it before or after Day 7. Unfortunately I am better at making plans than I am at following through with them – story of my life, and part of why I’m trying NaNoWriMo at all!

I was mildly surprised by how well the first few days of NaNo went for me. I should preface this with the reminder that, even at this point still, I don’t have a plot outlined. I don’t have a set of actions from point A to even point B. What I do have thus far is a series of random scenes and vignettes, 9926 words’ worth of them! My imagination is firmly the kind where it dreams up scenes and snippets of dialogue and a clever phrasing or two here and there, it isn’t very adept at sustained and coherent plot lines. This is most of the reason why I would never describe myself as a writer – I worry that a vague concept or idea isn’t viable as a narrative and so I never actually get around to fleshing them out into a timeline or chronology.

It was fine pantsing for Week One, but I’ve quickly realised, as the days have passed by, that this month would be so much easier on myself and my self-doubt if I did have some vague semblance of a chain of events to get me from beginning to end. Unfortunately, however, I am drastically behind – I’m meant to reach 15000 words by the end of today – so I feel like I don’t have the time to play catch up whilst also working on an outline. Of course, this is what I need to do in order to continue writing past this block I seem to have developed around the 9000 word mark.

Why, oh why, did I not decide to do NaNo earlier and so have plenty of time in October to at least cobble together some kind of outline? Curse you lack of foresight, curse you!

So, NaNoWriMo-ers, do share, do you have any tips and ticks for how to tease out a plot from a slightly anxious and overworked brain which is feeling less than creative (to say the least)? Nothing is too basic considering I don’t even have a synopsis or end-game for my novel!