National Novel Writing Month kicked off last Wednesday. (Check out my post explaining the history of NaNoWriMo.) I’ve done NaNoWriMo twice before (2014 and 2016) and hit my goal of 50,000 words each time. The first time I entered I began the month with a stack of index cards laying out each scene. The second time I had been working on the characters and plot for a few months, but went into it not certain how the story would unfold or wrap up.

This year I didn’t even do that much planning. I had a few vague ideas. And for this hard-core plotter, that was terrifying! (You might want to read Modern Mrs. Darcy’s short post on plotters vs. pantsers.)

On November 1st I did a couple of word sprints to get myself started. But after that I had to step back and figure out just who my characters were and what direction I was headed. I ended up spending the first few days brainstorming rather than writing.

Now the question is, am I really committed to writing 50K words by the end of the month?! Maybe posting this publicly is the kick in the pants that I need. So now let me share the bare bones of the story I’m attempting to get down.

Genre

The first solid idea I had for my project (back in October) was to write a polylogic epistolary novel. For a novel that would not be meticulously outlined ahead of time, this seemed like a good way to keep myself motivated and having fun creating different characters. Two of my favourite epistolary novels are 84, Charing Cross Road (which I am currently rereading for inspiration) and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I would really love to hear if you have other recommendations!

Setting

I decided to stick with my previous modus operandi of combining a contemporary setting with a plot involving artifacts from the past. During last week’s planning sessions I ended up moving the setting back to 1994 because I wanted write real letters rather than emails. (As far as I can recall 1994 is the year I started writing to pen pals as a child.)

Plot

As mentioned above, my plot is still bare bones. The gist of it is that the protagonist is trying to resolve relationship problems of her own making when she receives some unexpected letters dating back to the World Wars.

Characters

Right after I settled on character names that seemed fitting I bumped my setting back 20 years and decided I better change “Ethan” to “Justin” and “Avery” to “Ashley.” Here’s the list of current characters (subject to change without notice):

• Callista Walsh (protagonist)
• Michael Walsh (husband)
• Justin Walsh (son)
• Willa Embury (great-aunt)
• Gail Porter-Krakowski (Callista’s best friend)
• Ashley Anne MacMillan (Justin’s pen pal)
• Ricky Boomer (Justin’s classmate)
• Mason Omondi (used bookstore employee)
• Dr.  Everett Alexander Beddington (professor and/or archivist)

Inspiration

Here are three articles that are inspiring my plot:

• “Taiwan Families Receive Goodbye Letters Decades After Executions”

• “72-Year-Old Love Letter Returned to WWII Veteran”
• “From Your Soldier Boy – First World War postcards from the Europeana Online Portal”

Setbacks

I’ve faced two main obstacles so far. The first was that because I didn’t write an outline ahead of time I couldn’t charge full steam ahead and even ended up going back over my first day’s writing and rearranging and rewriting it to get me going in the right direction.

The second obstacle is that on November 2nd my laptop crashed. I have no idea what happened but the upshot is that I will probably have to send it away to have the operating system reloaded. I’m currently using another laptop that we own, but it is so slow that I might be going crazy.

Word Count

Current word count: 2,000 (Eek! But I haven’t got to today’s writing yet…I’m planning to double this number, at least.)

From now on I’ll post my current word count on my regular Friday “Historical Highlights” posts.

Happy writing to everyone else attempting this crazy project!