Writing and Road Trips

While watching a video about plot, the first speaker in the video managed to make me compare writing a story of any kind (be it short story, fanfiction, novel, or essay) to a road trip,which in the United States is almost synonymous to what historical novels would refer to as a “trip to the continent.” I must admit, I was in middle school when I first read this particular phrase and it took me until I was halfway through high school to actually figure out that when they referred to the continent and were European characters, they weren't talking about the U.S.

Writing as a road trip, however can be a sound idea, especially with NaNoWriMo 2015 beginning next Sunday morning. In fact each character in the piece of writing being worked on is either on the road trip with the writer or they are someone that you meet as you make the journey. The other thing is that the story for the reader is similar to a road trip as well. After all, unless you're trying to recreate something along the lines of Lord of the Flies, everyone knows it will have a happy ending. No, the journey is the important part, not the ending. As such, the same, in my opinion is true with every piece written.

Ideas and knowing what happens is easy. It's figuring out how that part of the story was reached or why the villain made that choice that can be interesting. Theories abound on why characters that are secondary, tertiary, and even “throw away” are speculated upon more than the main character, whose already had their story told. “Throw away” characters are those who are mentioned once or twice throughout a story in an abstract way that is meant to be considered negligible, such as the students upon a class list(students of Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, Durmstrang and Salem Witch's Academy are first in my mind.)

When working on your NaNoWriMo novel, maybe think about this: if you get stuck on your word count, delve into the life and viewpoint of one of these other characters. Tell the scene from the view of someone watching it instead of in the middle of it. Make a record of the emotions involved by everyone present. Just like on a road trip, if some little thing catches your attention, explore it. That's what writing is anyway. It's just an exploration of things that caught an author's attention and the characters are the people either on the journey or that were met on said journey.

Planning on working on a novel for NaNoWriMo 2015? What do you think you'll be working on?  Leave it in the comments.  Mine is likely to be a Leverage and Librarians crossover this time, though I may return to some of my original pieces!