As I noted in my previous blog post, one of my goals for 2021 is to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) month long writing challenge. NaNoWriMo is a non profit who aims to promote creative writing. The challenge that NaNoWriMo presents is to write a 50,000 word book within the month of November. So that’s about 1,666 words per day that I would have to write each day to reach my goal. In order to reach my goal, I am doing as much prep work as possible. So here are 3 Task , in no particular order of importance, that I am trying to complete in order to stimulate my creativity before creating an outline for my NaNoWriMo story.

Task 1: Find a Buddy

For me, finding a friend in creative arms, is an essential task when I am trying to create something new. So, when I started my NaNoWriMo journey, I decided to ask others if they would be interested in taking on the challenge too. This way I could have someone to bounce ideas around with, talk about world building, and have someone who could hold me accountable for my plans.

I was lucky enough to find a few friends who were interested in taking on the challenge, but I understand others may have difficulty in finding friends who want to write a 50,000 word book in the month of November. In order to help with that I have included a few links to websites where you can find people of common interest.

1. https://nanowrimo.org/: Join the NaNoWriMo Community by going to their site and signing up. When joining this community, you join a group of writers who are all aiming for the same goal and you can even find writers who are living within your area. They have meet ups and do working sessions together to help keep everyone focused.

2. https://discord.com/: Discord is an application that allows you to join communities and converse with them by voice or text. This application also has public servers that you can join by selecting the “Explore Public Servers” option and entering a phrase that matches your interests. Entering something as simple as Writing brings up a bunch of public servers for you to join.

3. Social Media: No matter which social media platform you use, you will have friends who are interested in a vast array of topics. Why not post a message there and see if anyone is interested in taking on the challenge with you? You can also just message your friends privately if you don’t want it to be publicly know, but you already knew that.

Task 2: Discover Art that Inspires

I scroll through sites like ArtStation (A community of artist to share their work) and Pinterest (a visual discovery engine) to find unique pieces of art to inspire my creativity. I would tend to look for a theme that would fit the story I am trying to tell.

Skull Cave by Quentin Mabille, see above, is a great example if I were writing a story about pirates. When I look at this image, I immediately ask: Where is this? What made this structure? Is this the skull of a giant? Who painted it? Is there treasure inside? Is the skull crying, or is it just the rain? Newflash! It is never just the rain.

After asking and answering these questions I would see how this train of thought could fit into my narrative. I wouldn’t use it verbatim, but I would take elements of it to spin a tale that works for me.

Task 3: Record Ideas Visually

As you can probably tell, I tend to have many ideas. Those ideas stay stuck in my head and can sometimes be forgotten if I don’t write them down as soon as I have them. So, to avoid the loss of ideas, I tend to use Visual Board tools to record them. There are many visual board tools out there, like Microsoft OneNote, Evernote & Milanote. Think of these sites as applications that allows users to create note and visual boards to organize your ideas. I ended up using Milanote, because I like the style and the free version doesn’t feel restricting to me. The free version grants users 100 items you can post on your wall as cards, and If you give your friends use your referral link, you can earn more cards more cards for each person who joins. Feel free to use my referral link to sign up if you’d like to give me more cards https://www.milanote.com/refer/rcCwiuh0Zjzu0Hs5mF

So what do you do to stimulate your creativity? Please comment below and let me know if you tried any of what I have noted above, and let me know what works for you.