Last year I read Stephen King’s Book, On Writing. It was really good, as books about writing go. One of the things that stuck with me was that there is nothing new under the sun. There are no new ideas, just new combinations of ideas. He says to take two unrelated things, and combine them in an original way.

Sometimes I try to combine news headlines for story ideas. For example, I’ve got these two intriguing news stories in my file. One is about a town that is trying to address its budgetary shortfalls by purchasing lottery tickets every week. It promises the townspeople that if it wins the lottery, it will eliminate taxes. The other story is about the history of an old suitcase in which the remains of two long-dead infants were found. The suitcase was traced back to a Scottish home care nurse in the early 1900s. It is still unknown whether the babies were hers, or whether they died of unnatural causes. The investigation continues.

Now the trick is to find a way to knit these two stories together. Got any ideas?

Here’s another news story that caught my eye. The Ontario Provincial Police pulled over a 24-year-old motorist and charged him with careless driving because he was reading a book while driving on Highway 401. I thought this was very, very interesting. But the police – and therefore the media – left out the most important detail: What was he reading? You could write a million stories about this, and they would all be different depending on the title of his book.

Nanowrimo’s going fairly well, by the way. My novel is not a novel. It’s something else entirely. I’ve written about 10,500 words now.

GC and I are about to embark on National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo), which starts tomorrow and continues for all of November. The object of the exercise is to write the first draft of a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

Last year I had a plan. I knew what my novel was about: two people who meet through online dating and ultimately experience a catastrophic clash of personality disorders. GC didn’t have a plan. He just started typing on November first and didn’t stop until the 30th.

When it was over, we reflected upon what we would do differently next (this) year. I vowed to have a more fully fleshed-out plan; I’d know the whole story before I began writing it. GC said he’d have some idea of what his story would be about before he started.

Well, here it is, October 31st, and neither one of us has a clue what our novels will be about. I’m not even sure mine will be a novel. Maybe it’ll be a collection of short stories. Maybe it’ll be a stream of consciousness. Maybe it’ll be a memoir. (All of these things would be technically against the rules, by the way. It’s National Novel Writing Month.)

Some of the things I liked about doing it last year, which is why I’m doing it again this year:

1. The emphasis on quantity, as opposed to quality, effectively disempowered my inner critic and my inner perfectionist. Sure, they still moaned and despaired about the quality, but they weren’t allowed to re-read, change or delete anything.
2. My constant need for material got me in the habit of seeing everything around me as potential material, which of course it is. I was thinking like a writer.
3. I liked the momentum that developed from writing every day, as opposed to my usual method, which involves waiting for inspiration and getting very little written.
4. After I got a single copy of my novel published (six months after I wrote it), I sat down and read it and I was surprised to discover I kind of liked my book. Sure, there were some cringe-worthy bits and glaring plot holes and tangents and dropped balls, but there were also some interesting twists and details, some witty bits and good ideas.
5. There’s a book on my bookshelf with my name on the spine!