Updated every day of Nano. You may need to scroll down to see today’s prompt.

I had a last minute NaNo inspiration that will help me. I tend to skip over description. So for each day of NaNo month I’ll send out a prompt to focus your attention on something you might not ordinarily notice in whatever scene you’re working on. The intent is not to generate great prose but to force you to expand your vision of what’s going on around and inside your characters.

Write at least one paragraph for the day’s prompt:

Today’s prompt:

7. In the next conversation, describe something the character is doing as they speak each line of dialogue.

Previous prompts:

1. Describe your point of view (POV) character’s current emotional state and how it affects him or her from head to toe.
2. Describe the shoes of the next character that walks into the scene and what they remind the POV character of.
3. Describe the weather (or environment if weather isn’t relevant to your story) in the scene you’re writing right now. Involve all 5 senses.
4. Relate something in your current scene to a toy from your POV character’s childhood.
5. The current situation to your POV character is [fill in an animal]. Extend the metaphor. What in the situation are the teeth? Why is something like the breath? How does it relate to the sound the character makes? (And whatever else you can come up with. Use all five senses!)
6. It starts raining (or stops raining). Describe the emotions *and* memories this evokes in your POV character.

(Scroll down for today’s prompts.)

• You know how sometimes an idea will pop into your head while you’re writing something else? It’s an obvious idea and you know you’ll remember it so you slog through the scene and by the end you’ve forgotten what it was?

 

• You know how sometimes you’ll hover over the keyboard, debating which choice to make and you just can’t decide what would work best?

One of the Nanoers at our local kick off party mentioned a technique in Weekend Novelist called:

Writing Down the Page

(I can’t find a description on line so either she misremembered its name or no one else found it nifty, but I’m finding it useful! If anyone knows what it’s called, please let me know!)

It’s a way to capture fleeting ideas and get you writing instead of hovering.

If you use this for your whole NaNo (which I’m doing), you’ll end up with a flowing collection of ideas. Which is a great way to send your internal editor on vacation since you may not be writing complete sentences and you’re deliberately including a range of ideas some of which you know you’ll eventually eliminate.

The important part is: don’t write paragraphs. Hit carriage return after each sentence or snatch of an idea. It’s going to look more like a poem, a long list, than a novel. It’s a free flowing brainstorm. You can put an extra carriage return when you start a new idea and label it with some bold text.

Sometimes a fairly cohesive scene will flow out. (Mine is conforming to scenes and chapters.) Often it will be snatches of dialog. Bits of description. Questions for you to answer. Or half a dozen possibilities of what a character might do and why.

So if you’re stuck, don’t ponder. Write down the problem. Explore it right there in your Nano. Brainstorm a list of possibilities. If an idea for a scene comes up while you’re doing that, write it down right where you are. (You can mark it with xxx to remind yourself to move it and expand it later.)

Then I explore obstacles (conflicts) I can throw in their way. (I tend to be too nice to my characters! Deliberately brainstorming obstacles keeps me focused on a story’s engine: overcoming difficulties!) Each of these obstacles creates an evolving set of minigoals for the character to achieve (getting away from the annoying coworker, getting shoes that don’t have a broken heel, for example).

Then I write down possible responses to the obstacles and how the character can reveal more of who he is, reveal more of what’s going on in the story, in what he chooses to do and the way he chooses to do it. It helps remind me of the tree I’m writing about rather than getting lost in the foliage of a few thousand individual leaves.

I’m finding it much easier to throw problems and obstacles at a character when I don’t (yet) need to write the scene that gets them out of it!

Cry over spilled milk.
Pull the wool over his eyes.
Wet behind the ears.
Wild goose chase.
Sky’s the limit.
With flying colors.
Face the music.
Throw a monkey wrench into the works.
Can’t make heads or tails out of it.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Third time’s the charm.
On cloud nine.

Idea from Charloft where’s there’s a new theme each day for your characters. (A very active community.) There are loads of responses to this particular one. In case the Live Journal community disappears one day, I saved the list.

I also opened an Ordinary and Special topic at the NaNoWriMo forums.

Roll over the post’s image and you can see all the faces, male and female, averaged together. (The sampling of images does contain a large proportion of Caucasians.) Is it a girl or a boy? It would be interesting to see a composite of all 20 yos, 30 yos, etc in the world :-)

What’s interesting is that average isn’t bland but tends toward beauty. So beauty isn’t so extraordinary as it is average!

Flash fiction are stories less than a 1000 words and come in many varieties with sometimes very specific rules. Some other names are: short-short stories, sudden, postcard, minute, furious, fast, quick, and skinny fiction. Many have websites where you can share the torture of confining your writing by word count:

365 Tomorrows posts a new flash fiction everyday. You may submit your (science fiction based) stories for consideration.

Camille Renshaw provides a good overview of the craft in The Essentials of Micro-Fiction.

Here are a few types of flash fiction with specific limitations:

• pinhead stories (50 words or fewer)
• nanofiction (less than 50)
• 55 word (55 or fewer but must include a setting, character or characters, conflict, resolution, so it’s not, for example, a slice of life piece.) You can read the 2008 winners of the 55-word contest run by New Times magazine for inspiration.
• 69er, 88er, 99er
• microfiction (under 100)
• drabble (100 exactly and its spinoffs: dribble - exactly 50 words, droubble - exactly 200 words) The Drabble Project has some examples from drabble’s beginnings.
• ficleys (64-1024 words but you can continue someone else’s story).