What to write

So I'm still trying to decide what to write for NaNo, which I hate because I didn't have this problem last time. Looking around the NaNo forums, I've noticed a lot of people are looking at this more as something to have fun with than as a way to write a serious novel. I am more doing the latter, but I realize that's making it harder for me. And I'm wondering why these are the ideas I'm considering in the first place! Both my ideas are YA (young adult) and both would be on the serious side. Or rather, the one about a death would be fairly serious, and the one about the sisters would be lighter in tone but it still wouldn't be humor. My last NaNo novel was angsty YA as well. It had some quirky humor, but most of the humor was sarcastic. However...these all seem like kind of odd choices for me.

The other night, we were watching Cheap Seats, a funny show on ESPN, and my husband and I both recognized the musical intros as the work of the guy who did the musical intros on the old MTV puppet comedy Sifl & Olly, which we loved. I started thinking about how odd my tastes are. I like some pretty weird stuff. Usually humor, and preferably absurd humor. Other TV shows I've loved have included The Adventures of Pete & Pete (my all-time favorite), Stella, Mr. Show, and The Office (both British & American). We own several of those on DVD, as well as some SCTV and Monty Python. For movies, some of my favorites include Raising Arizona, After Hours, Repo Man, Better Off Dead, This is Spinal Tap and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I'm pretty fond of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and I'd pick Shaun of the Dead over any chick flick. (And can I admit we own Weird Al's movie UHF?! It's the first move my husband and I saw together!)

My favorite book is probably a goofy British (and religious) humor book called The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, Aged 37-3/4, but I also love The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (especially love that it's a 5-book "trilogy"!) and I was rather fond of Slaughterhouse Five (certainly not humor, but quite bizarre). When I have ventured into contemporary adult fiction, I've been drawn to Anne Tyler, whose characters are always quirky. One of my favorite novels is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which isn't humor but is definitely not for everyone's taste. One of my favorite children's novels is Whales on Stilts by M.T. Anderson, and I also adore Louis Sachar's books, especially Holes and the very strange Wayside School series.

What I'm getting at is...I don't have normal tastes. So why do I write such "normal" novels for NaNoWriMo? I do write some weirder stuff. One of my YA novels in progress has a lot to do with beets. One of my midgrade novels is about a town battling over purple bubble gum, and another has a protagonist named Ferval. The short story I just had published was about a boy getting a bike with square wheels, and once I actually had a story published in which two people fall in love while arguing over a dancing duck. But when it comes to NaNo, I feel this pull to write more "serious" stuff. It's not just for NaNo. This is stuff I want to write anyway. And I guess, I pick it for NaNo partly because it's harder for me, so I put off writing this stuff when I first get the ideas...so these ideas are what I have in my idea bank when I have to start writing a novel I haven't started yet.

Now, I do like reading serious and/or angsty YA, and many of my favorite books growing up were exactly that. My favorite ever, A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L'Engle, deals with death and depression. One of my favorite midgrade novels as a kid was Beat the Turtle Drum by Constance C. Greene, in which the main character's sister dies, and I also liked The Language of Goldfish by Zibby Oneal, about a preteen facing mental illness. One of my favorite movies is Running on Empty, a fairly dramatic movie in which a teenager faces leaving his family forever, and on the less serious side, I loved Pretty in Pink, which is at least heavy on the teenage angst. So this stuff isn't out of my interest range, but being on the serious side, it doesn't generally flow out as quickly as the fun, quirky stuff. And I wonder if I should be truer to myself, and put more absurdity into even these. In some ways, I always will--I don't think I can avoid a few goofy asides, or references to strange things like the cat romances in my last NaNo novel, but I also wonder if I should make NaNo easier on myself and write someting wacky & fun! But I don't have any wacky, fun ideas right now that I haven't already started, and I think I'm getting too late to come up with something else when I already have 2 ideas. Plus, it's probably better to push myself to write something I might not get to otherwise, than to write something I'd find easier to start. But if it's too hard, I worry that I won't do it at all! In 2003, I did sign up, wrote 488 words on the first day, and promptly gave up because I hated my idea and had nowhere to go with it, anyway. I want to avoid that happening again!

(And sorry this post is so long, but I guess I'm falling into NaNo mode, where the more words you write, the better!)

Start the insanity

2 weeks to NaNoWriMo. 2 weeks to stress out about a plot, or lack of one. So let the madness begin.

So far I have 2 very vague novel ideas, both of which I've been batting around in my head for a few years. But I don't have much plot for either one. I have protagonists, with names, and one has a pretty clear personality, and I have starting points. I even sort of, slightly have ending points. But not middles. Not even second steps, places to go right after starting them. Without that, I don't think I'm going to make it.