Two days till NaNoWriMo. I am going to participate this year, and this time I will actually keep writing all month, instead of stopping after a week, or whatever it was I did last year.
The rules dictate that I can’t have written any of this work beforehand, so I can’t continue any of my old stories. It’s good to have a clean slate, but for awhile I wasn’t sure I’d be able to think of something to write about.
However, an interesting concept came to me recently. It touches on personal privacy issues and the paranormal. The story will take place a couple generations from now, so things will still be recognizable, but there will be plenty of new technology.
Even if this has been done before, it’s never been done by me, so I think it will be worth doing even if I can’t publish it.
Having a concept is all well and good, but the characters are paramount. Right now I’m seeing two principal characters, a teenager and a younger sibling, and I’m thinking they’re being raised by a single father who has become very overprotective since divorcing his wife, who is an abusive alcoholic. I haven’t figured out the kids’ genders yet, but right now I’m leaning towards the idea of both of them as girls.
I’m considering using my old AMRN character, Natalie “Byron” Ryan, for the teenage daughter, but I haven’t decided yet. This would actually be somewhat convenient, because the closest character I’ve played to how I envison the girls’ father is Bill Anderson, who was Byron’s self-appointed guardian. However, I don’t want to trap myself within old story ideas–this is going to be something new and different. (The teenage daughter will not have high levels of Spiritia ;P)
I’m also not sure from whose perspective I will write. It’s tempting to write from the father’s perspective, because his motivations are key and I feel the urge to explain them, but ultimately I think it will be best to have the father represent a circumstance rather than act as protagonist. With the teenage daughter I have the perfect foil for both the reaction to the father’s actions and the realization of the phenomena surrounding the younger sister…
I do think I’ll stick to third person, though, because a teenage girl’s perspective would be tiring to write (and read).