November is NaNoWriMo month.  This is the first year I’ll be participating.  What is NaNoWriMo you ask?  Well I’m glad you asked.  NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month.  It takes place every November.  The goal is to write an entire novel (50,000 words) in one month.  You can outline, plan, do whatever you want in the month’s prior, but you can’t start writing the actual thing until November 1^st.  You have to put your pens (or laptops) down at the end of the day on November 30^th.  Everyone who reaches the 50,000-word goal is a “winner” of NaNoWriMo.

This might sound cheesy to non-writers, but this amount of writing is no simple task.  Add to that the fact that many people, like me, are doing this in addition to their normal daily work and writing, and it’s a huge feat to accomplish.  I’ve struggled to consistently reach 1,000 words a day for at least five days a week for the last couple of months.  Doing this will be a huge leap in the amount I write each day.

The great thing about NaNoWriMo is that the goal is to write, write, write.  You have to go as fast as possible with no looking back if you want to get everything on paper in such a short amount of time.  You can go back, edit, and make things look pretty after the fact, which is actually the way I prefer to work anyway.  This is why I’m so excited to participate and give it a try.  I really want to get in the habit of getting more on paper and spitting out everything that’s in my head.  Let me tell you, it’s a lot more satisfying to see a bunch of crap written out then to see all kind of potential float around in my head while I beat myself up for not sitting down and writing.  That’s my goal – write more and the rest will come naturally.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to write about.  Keeping with the habits I’m trying to break, I failed to put down on paper a proper outline until Halloween candy was being passed out.  I had decided about a month ago that I was going to write a story about a suburban Phoenix neighborhood (easy enough for me to relate to, right?) and the different lives on a street.  I’ve tentatively titled it, “Epic Adventures of Suburban Lives”.  I didn’t want it to bash suburbia as other stories so often do.  That’s too easy.  That’s not to say that what comes out of the stories will all be positive, but I’m trying to approach it without a jaded viewpoint.

I had nothing more than that idea and title to go off of until I had a breakthrough about a week and a half ago.  Now I know exactly where the story is going – I’m using the neighborhood of John and Sarah, my main characters from the “Monsoon” screenplay.  This novel is going to take place a year before the events in the script and their two families will be characters in the story.  Excited by this new approach, I sketched out on paper their half of the block.  I narrowed it down to 10 houses, 5 on each side.  My plan is to tell the story from the viewpoint of all the people on this street in these houses.  Each chapter will be from someone else’s perspective.  There will be overlap, but I’m not sure if it’s going to come out as a straightforward narrative or a collection of short stories.  The writing will lead the way.

I really recommend that anyone who enjoys writing give NaNoWriMo a try.  It’s a ton of fun and it looks like they have a very supportive community.  At the very least, pitch in a few bucks to support the cause.  I plan to.  I will update my progress this month as I go, tracking the ups and downs of trying to create something from scratch.  Wish me luck!

What is science fiction?  How would you define it and categorize it?  There are so many types; it’s hard to lock down one clear definition.  I’m taking a Sci-Fi writing class through the UCLA Extension Program this semester and the instructor asked for our own definition.  I had never thought about this and it’s tougher than I thought.

To make our jobs easier, he first gave us his interpretation of science fiction.

“Any story that relies on science for its narrative advancement.”

This helps cover the variety of different sci-fi genres, but I don’t think I like it.  I believe what makes sci-fi so compelling (at least to us sci-fi nerds) is that it holds a mirror up to society better than any contemporary story could.  The science is a way of telling the story in a unique way.  However, the science can be stripped away from many of examples of science fiction and still leave the main story.  When the USS Enterprise visits a warring planet and tries to make peace, it’s a diplomatic story.  No warp drive is necessary to tell that tale.  District 9 deals with apartheid, it just uses aliens to effectively get its point across.  Doctor Who is sci-fi at its finest, but some of the best episodes require the Doctor to make do without technology – his TARDIS can’t be reached in “The Satan Pit”; he is a human in “Human Nature”.

I don’t believe a story has to rely on science in order to be classified as sci-fi.  A time travel story requires the technology to time travel, true, but it’s what happens in the past or future and the characters’ interactions that make up the majority of the story.  The narrative is driven by their actions and attitudes while in a strange new world.  It becomes a reflection of our own thoughts and ideals in our time and how they differ either in hindsight or in potential.  I think in nearly every case of sci-fi, you can tell the same story in a different way without the science.  It just wouldn’t be as interesting.

So how would I define science fiction?  That’s a good question.  I’m sure anything I put forth would be full of more holes than my instructor’s attempt.  The problem is, there’s so many types – military, time travel, distopia/utopia, steampunk, hard, soft.  The great thing about science fiction though, is that it always stirs debate.  Debates about the realism of technology in the story, debates about the moralistic views of the characters, debates about how the characters are reflections of modern day – even when going for pure entertainment, there is something special about the multiple layers of any science fiction story.

I would say any story that invokes science as a story element in a speculative or fictional manner can be defined as science fiction.  That’s to say that, this fictional science is used in order to create the world of the story.  It’s a structure, but it’s only one pillar of the whole.  It creates a world, but it doesn’t necessarily drive the narrative.  That is left to the characters.

A phaser is no different than a gun in the sense that it’s used to achieve the same end.  But how cool is it to see a laser instead of a bullet?  And how cool is science fiction that writers can imagine all kinds of impossibilities that may someday come to pass?  As technology continues to advance at breakneck speeds, the range of sci-fi storytelling continues to grow. The problem with trying to define science fiction is that it knows no bounds.  It speaks to us in many ways, through many forms.  That is the beauty of it.