[AE.NiNoBilMa] February NiNoBilMa
Apologies for the late start this month. I'm learning that the beginning of months tend to be unsettled; it's one of those obvious lessons that I leaned over and over again before ADHD-meds that I'm hoping will stick with me if I make a specific note of it, post-meds. I am adjusting some of my plans and expectations for the rest of the year of NiNoBilMa in ways I'll discuss in another newsletter in the near future, ideally later this week, but failing that, before March arrives.
Outside of these opening paragaphs, I'm keeping this short and sweet and leaving out explanations and digressions, as part of making the monthly continuation of this project less of a big deal to my work-brain, psychologically.
For this month, I simply want to build on what I was working on last month, which was essentially a version of Baby's First Outline Technique: opening, three points, ending, with slight variation based on whether one is telling a story or making an argument.
Last month the goal was to write a paragraph (or equivalent amount of prose with more or fewer linebreaks) by writing an outline of five sentences and then rewriting them. For this month, I will be using the same outlining technique but the rewrite will also be an expansion, with a goal of turning each item from the outline into two or three sentences.
For nonfiction/opinion-pieces, the expanded version will elaborate on the point in some fashion, whether by adding more information or making the same case from a different angle. For fiction/storytelling pieces, the expanded version of an outline point will be a little story within itself, a concise set of small events that are related or follow from one another.
For anybody still playing along at home, feel free to reuse last month's matrix of topics. I may go back to it myself, and I might even try reusing some of the same outlines, but in order to keep things fresh and make sure that I'm stretching myself even as I'm doing such almost literally elementary exercises, I've created a new list of topics:
Traveling
Holidays
Relationships
With two forms of writing (opinion and story), this once again makes it possible to roll a standard six-sided die to create an assignmenty:
Opinion: Traveling
Story: Traveling
Opinion: Holidays
Story: Holidays
Opinion: Relationships
Story: Relationships
As ever and always, even if you are using my prompts, they can mean whatever you take them to mean. "Relationships" can be about any kind of relationship. "Holiday" can be taken in the US or UK sense of the word. If that shades into redundance with Traveling... well, to be honest, I initially had one topic as Vacation/Holiday, but it occurred to me that I might have things to say about journeys that weren't necessarily vacations, and that I might have things to say about holidays that didn't involve travel.
But again, they mean what you want them to mean. And if whatever this list as a whole means to you doesn't work for you, you can create your own list, or mix two of my lists together, or whatever. Also as ever and always, I am not the boss of you.
My goal for this month remains the same as last month: have a completed exercise to show for each of the six items and hopefully have at least one thing I feel pretty good about, with a fallback that succeeding at writing anything is succeeding at writing.
Happy writing!