Sitting down to write this I realize my recollection of October and November feels muddy; like a river of rushing words where memories leap from the static like salmon running upstream, the rest flowing past without solid definition. That’s how writing during NaNoWriMo was for me, a nonstop flow of words onto the page without much filter (though, not exactly stream of consciousness writing).
I’m writing this series of posts as a dissection of my months dedicated to writing. This post is about what I did before actually beginning NaNoWriMo, before the marathon of words, before the jumbled story river ever existed. What insane path did I carve to produce this river before me?
Let me preface this by saying no action is too small when motivating yourself in the face of a challenge. Some of what I’ve written below might seem frivolous, but all adds up to one event: starting the first draft of a new novel.
Firstly, What is Preptober/NaNoWriMo/etc.?
Here’s a brief explanation of a few key concepts for those unfamiliar with Preptober or NaNoWriMo (consider it ‘required reading’).
NaNoWriMo (or, National Novel Writing Month) is held every November and is a challenge for writers to write 50,000 words (what NaNo considers “a whole novel”) in one month. For reference, imagine just over 100 pages of 12 pt. Times New Roman font on 8.5”x11” paper with 1” margins - that’s around 50,000 words, depending on your spacing/dialogue/etc. (unfortunately, I don’t know what it is in Papyrus, or Wingdings). That’s a goal to write 1,667 words per day, or 3-4 pages.
Whew, good thing I was a math major.
Preptober is far easier to explain and sounds like what it is: a month of preparation done in October to hit the ground running in November. Consider yourself, ahem, prepared.
A Novel Idea
For the last year, I’ve had the idea for a post-apocalyptic novel that I’ve been developing (we’ll call it: Project A). I have rough ideas around the worldbuilding, some sense of the characters I want (not who they are), and a premise/beat ideas for Project A. I’ve driven around town many times with a Project A playlist on repeat featuring songs that get me excited to write. So, when the idea of NaNo creeped into my mind, my first thought was ‘do I finally write Project A?’.
No. The answer was no.
And, looking back on how the actual writing of NaNo went, I’m pretty glad I didn’t do that. I found it difficult while writing under the November time constraint to write scenes that I had in my mind from day one. Big beat scenes where I could envision everything ended up being the most difficult for me. I couldn’t feel like I was doing them justice when I was more interested in the quantity of words (and pace) over quality. Imagine how difficult that would have been with an idea I had spun on for over a year.
But, the idea for that novel caused a breakthrough during my Preptober work.
I’ve always had idea nuggets for stories, and one of them was about a tribe of people living along the edge of a massive crater, and in the center, off in the distance, stood a tower that would shine emerald light every night. That image stuck out in my mind, and eventually evolved into the question: what if a group of tribe members fell from the cliff’s edge and were left stranded in the crater - would they try to find a way up, or try to reach the mysterious tower?
NaNo felt like the perfect time to write this story and I got to planning. I started worldbuilding - figuring out what their culture was like, the culture of other tribes around the crater, what their beliefs were, what each group thought the light was, their origins, etc.
But two questions lingered: What is the origin of the tower, and what is the origin of the crater?
Then it hit me - a key piece of existing worldbuilding for Project A would explain the existence of both.
I wasn’t just writing a novel, I was writing a sequel… to a book that didn’t even exist.
The realization that my story wasn’t set in a new universe, but in the one I had already started planning, helped me immensely. I once joked to someone that I should set all my stories in Wisconsin in the way Stephen King sets most of his in Maine. That’s the sort of thinking that expanded my idea of this story. Even better, it flooded me with motivation. Though the NaNo novel would be set hundreds of years (at least) after the events of Project A, and I wouldn’t be using most of Project A’s worldbuilding, just the idea made me far more excited to write.
Signing Up for NaNoWriMo.org
Early in October, with lofty ambitions, I went and signed up on the official NaNoWriMo website. I created a new project and linked it to the 2023 official NaNoWriMo event with a 50k word count goal.
The website asked me for a working book title. Uh-oh.
Let’s see, it’s a coming-of-age tale about wild teens surviving in a dangerous forest, or woods… Wildwood… get it… WILDWOOD?! - yeah, it’s a bit on the nose. But it’s a working title I like, and NaNo is about speed and just rolling with it. Don’t let a working title bog you down.
Ironically enough, one morning as I was driving home from dropping my daughter off at daycare, I found a nearby neighborhood with a big sign out front stating ‘Wildwood’. I had never seen this sign before, and it was already late October when I first did - so I took that as a sign (literally) that I was on the right track.
How AI Helped My Motivation
After additional brainstorming, I had a picture in my mind of the general setting the novel took place in. As stated above, key elements of the landscape include a somewhat circular crater that extends for miles, a tower in the center that radiates green light at night, and a dangerous forest growing up from the crater floor.
On the NaNo website, your project can be assigned a book cover, and I thought it would be neat to find one - whether it was a still from a movie or a piece of art. Somehow I got the idea to attempt using AI image generation to produce a sample book cover, as well as tonal pieces that I could use to further motivate me and use in my outline.
Disclaimer: I only ever intend to use the selected pieces for personal development of the book, not for any distributed marketing/cover/interior of the book. AI image generation has a habit of stealing work that I’m absolutely against. But, I think there are good personal uses for AI generated images, so long as people draw a moral line in the proverbial sand when it comes to usage. I’m sharing two AI generated images below that HOPEFULLY don’t contain infringement on original artwork (if either strongly do, please message me with info on the original and I’ll gladly share credits/links).
“Anyways,” he said, stepping down from his soapbox.
I used Microsoft Bing’s AI Image Creator (powered by DALL-E 3) to generate a slew of images that I slowly refined until it: 1) was closer to what I was picturing, or 2) captured the feeling/tone in a great way even if the imagery was off. And, whoo boy, let me tell you, the imagery was often different from the picture I thought I’d get. I continued to generate images, refined my generation keywords, saved off a number of images, and then combed through those to find two favorites.
The following image was the ‘runner-up’. It clearly captured aspects of the crater wall, the green ‘tower’, and the forest. One big thing I didn’t like about this image was the tone - it feels strongly reminiscent of middle-grade fantasy covers. I was going into NaNo hoping to write an adult horror novel with fantasy elements, and this lacked the aspects of horror I was hoping for (even though I’d say my first draft is more fantasy than horror).
While I called the structure in the distance a ‘tower’ in the outline, the keyword ‘spire’ better represented a visual that felt more imposing. In many cases, ‘tower’ provided a stone, flat-topped building that squatted in the crater rather than stood tall over it. I played with many variations on keywords, swapping words like ‘green’ with ‘viridian’, or ‘crater’ with ‘cliffs’.
At one point, I tried generating the crucial scene where the teens fall from the cliff’s edge - not realizing the implied harm in the keywords. DALL-E did not like that, and would not generate such a scene (wait… did the AI think I was trying to generate harmful images?!).
I ended up with the following image for my NaNo cover and stuck it in my outline. I had to start including color keywords to generate something I felt matched the visuals and the tone. Also, due to the color contrast washing out some of the details in this one, it feels a little more like the abstract cover style that has become relatively popular on modern bookshelves.
I like the way this one has a solitary teen peering at the tower; though Wildwood features a diverse cast traveling together, there’s a strong focus on the internal psychology of each character. Even though they’re together, they’re still alone in some ways.
My only real issue with this image is the spire, which gives off strong fantasy vibes. It definitely feels more ‘Wizard of Oz’, or ‘some kind of wizard absolutely lives here’. I can confidently say, there are no wizards in Wildwood.
In the next post, we’ll take a look at my Preptober process for monthly planning, writing sprints, story outlining, and character development. Check it out here: