Plot Idea, Theme, or Character?

So you've decided to write a book. Not only that you've decided to do National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. GREAT! Good luck getting your 50,000 + words before December 1!Now you want to know where to get started. HERE is where you get started.

 

First of all I am going to cover a lot of techniques here on this blog for the next month about writing a book. These are things I've picked up along the way. Among them are passion, perspective, characterization, plotting, pantsing (it's a thing, y'all), world building, digging deep, perseverance, and creativity.

 

Now on to the question of the day, which should come first. The answer is, it doesn't matter. You need one of these ideas to get started and over the coming days I will show you what to do with each of them. But for now let's expand on each of these.

 

I started my last new novel "Roanoke, the Lost Martian Colony" with a plot idea. I wrote almost 60,000 words in well under a month over the course of July. The idea came about late one night after I accidentally fell asleep on my couch. I was homesick and being from North Carolina, the story of The Lost Colony is taught basically every year in Social Studies so I had it on the brain. If you want the story you can find a pretty basic accounting of it here. For me the intrigue of the original story isn't what happened to the colonists. That's pretty obvious if you use some critical reasoning skills. It's that whoever carved that message "Croatan" on the tree thought it was perfectly obvious what they were saying and we, the ones who wrote the history have been puzzled by it for the last four hundred and fifteen years give or take a few months. And though no conclusive evidence has been found to explain where the colonists went, I awoke in the middle of the night with the idea that perhaps the only way to up the ante on this mystery was to make it a "locked room mystery." How do you lock away an entire colony and then get them to disappear? They have to be some place where there is no obvious way out. And so I transported the bare essentials of the story to Mars. I changed a bunch of things, moved where the actions was, changed names, changed who was where when and kept a hefty dose humor and voila, I had a plot. It took me less than two weeks to come up with the idea and flesh out some of the important characters. Another three to write it. So that's how plot comes first.

But for my series "Avon Rising" my main character Princess Aaralyn came first. I had dreamed of her for years. I saw her, felt compelled by her, and yet I had no idea what her story was. When suddenly she came to me in a dream and revealed her sad story to me. So there I had a character and her story come first. It took me back in time from where I saw her to the beginning of her story and that's how I got an epic fantasy series.

I have yet to come up with a theme to write a book, though I do give great considerations to themes  in the planning stages. So now find one of these three things, an idea that has been eating at you until you can tell a story. Write it down, even if it's only a word, or small idea or one sentence. There your novel has begun.

I'll be back tomorrow with more help.

Love,

Melanie