In what is perhaps slightly inimical to the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I'm doing some prewriting today, as my students did last week. I appreciate the thrill of setting forth on November 1st, or whenever you start, without so much as a chart, a compass, or even a back-up keg of drinking water on your metaphorical novelling boat. But for me, at least, it's never worked. I posted a list of prewriting exercises in the previous post on NaNoWriMo lesson plans, and I'm sitting and grading my way now through a big pile of them. And it's absolutely thrilling, the fantasies and the mysteries and the slice-of-life novels and the romances and all the rest of it that my students are hopefully writing right now.
The really interesting thing is the combination of similarity and variety. I've come across three or four "young teenager goes to a fantasy world and has a quest" plots, for example. Hey, it's a tried-and-true formula for everyone from C.S. Lewis to Neil Gaiman. And yet, even just in utero, I can see differences in character, in tone, and certainly in events that are going to make each of these novels completely its own. Last NaNo, one of my close friends and I retold the same fairy tale. We've known each other over ten years, lived together for four years before her marriage, read, watch and listen to much of the same media, and even got our English degrees at the same college, so it'd be hard to find two people more likely to write similar stories. There is NOTHING beyond the bare bones of the story similar between her book and mine. (Hers is closer to finished, for one thing.)
It's such a cliche, but everyone really does have their own story to write, and that book will never exist if they don't write it.
And now I'm off to finish grading and then do MY homework -- namely, my plot rollercoaster and my annotated NaNo playlist!
Not to argue your point in the least, because I know perfectly well the stories were different, but did you ever read mine? I forget. I never read yours! So I don't know that they were different.
ReplyDeleteIn the interests of full confession, I should point out that mine involved a second fairytale, too.
Also, "closer to finished" is entirely relative and may not be true. I haven't read yours so I can't be certain.
Clearly what we learn from this is that I need to read your NaNo from last year and then we both need to finish them. Right.
Also, I'm too tired right now, but remind me that this is exactly what Vivian Gornick was talking about in the last bit of The Situation and the Story that I read, and we should discuss it. In our case, the situation was supplied by the fairytale; the story was what we were each wanting to say with it.