Nano 2021 Day 1-The Blank Page

Today is the first day of Nanowrimo 2021. To say I’m starting with a blank page isn’t strictly true. I have a good idea of my story and what I want to put in it, a synopsis of 12,861 words and I’ve broken the story down into thirty-seven chapters with titles that give a brief description of the scene. As you can see, I’m using Scrivener.

Scenes of my Story in Scrivener’s Corkboard

I intend to write my first draft through from beginning to end, which is unusual for me. Usually I have ideas for scenes that come later in the story and write these in first, then go back and fill in the blank chapters as ideas arise or as I need to. I’ve also been guilty of reading over and editing as I go, the first chapter especially, but I am going to resist doing that and just keep going. I know that means that it won’t be very good in terms of descriptive elements and interesting prose, but that can come later. What’s important at this stage is getting the words down.

My story opens with a World War 1 aerial dogfight between a British fighter pilot and a German Fokker. They say ‘write what you know’, well I know nothing about what it’s like to fly a plane while you’re being fired on, so I’ve had to do some research. Luckily, there are a lot of websites dedicated to just this sort of thing and I’m quite pleased with the scene so far. It introduces one of my main characters and sets the time period for the time slip part of the story. I was a little unsure whether to include it as I initially thought I’d be giving too much of the story away, but have solved that problem by ending the scene sooner than originally planned. Hopefully, readers will be intrigued by the opening and want to read on to find out what the connection is between this WW1 pilot and my protagonist, who lives in the 21st century.

I’ve already ditched the scene for chapter 2, a party where my protagonist, Maddie or Maddy (I haven’t decided on the spelling yet), has an argument with her boyfriend, as I felt it added nothing to the story and the events within it could be revealed in other ways in the next chapter. So, that’s the first three ‘chapters’ out of the way.

My word count for today is 2529 words.

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