So, over the course of this year, I went to note my ideas down, trying to outline everything. One thing that really helped me with that, was creating individual boards on Pinterest. I am a very visual person and need pictures to visualize something. And after creating a board for each of my story ideas, I finally settled with the story I loved the most – a story with a high fantasy setting (spoiler: there will be dragons). For now, it is called Fangs And Storms, but this is only the working title. I am also not the biggest plotter and thus I started with creating characters – first my main characters and then sidekicks, friends, enemies and everything in between. I love creating individual characters and every time I got a new idea for a character, I started to collect ideas. But I also started to plan different races, the countries and cities, fashion, folklore and many more. While doing so, the original story I had in mind, developed itself into something more and inevitably, I – more or less – started the plotting of my novel-to-be.
To be honest, I still haven’t much of a plot. It is more a collection of bits and pieces and overall an over-all idea of how it should be. You could say that my story is more character-driven than plot-driven at this point. But as I said – I do have an idea of what should happen in general. It’s just that there are still open parts that need to be filled and most of it will probably happen while I’m writing. I don’t want to say that this is what makes it fun, because I am pretty certain that at one point I will curse myself for this.
My main goal is still to write a novel with 50.000 words – but I also want to get to know my characters and see where the path will lead. I know that this will be a very rough first draft and (I also hope) this project will someday have even more than 50.000 words. But for now, I’d be happy to even reach my word goal. To push me a bit and motivate myself, I’ll post a recap of every week here on my blog.
Are you participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo? If so – what is your project about? I’d love to hear about your setting and story! And if you have questions about my novel, please feel free to ask.
