[AE.NiNobilMa] NiNoBilMa 2022: Kindergarten, Week 2
Hello, and welcome to week 2 of #NiNoBilMa!
I have been reflecting a lot on what worked well the first week and what didn't work, and the short version is: more people liked the short semi-daily prompts I put on Twitter than the very open-ended one of "write something about animals or feelings", and I spent way more time and effort than I actually had available thinking about, working on, responding to, and writing about NiNo stuff than I spent actually doing it, both in the sense of sharing and engaging with it publicly or writing.
So first of all, let me just say: I didn't think educators had an easy job, but I didn't think what I was doing was sufficiently educational to be as much work as it wound up being. I'm structuring this week in a way that I can hopefully keep this quirky little side project as more of a side project and less of a thing that takes over my life or causes burnout.
Second... looking at some of the problems I had and that I heard, I honestly don't think that any of the broad categories I had for prompts is going to work better for me personally than animals did, nor do I want to start each week over rebuilding my understanding of creating prompts for entirely new topics.
I also think there's something about animals that makes them a good writing prompt. They're living beings with agency and inner lives. They can be very human-ish. Certainly when being used in fiction, they can take on very human characteristics. And we have all kinds of different cultural, mythical, and personal associations for them that can make certain personality traits suggest themselves to us. But as they're not human, there's a level of disconnect or removal that might make it easier to getting to writing about an animal character without worrying about getting it right.
So as we move through the month, I'm going to keep the animal element alive, but rotate each week a more abstract prompt. This week: numbers. You can interpret the two prompts as going together and write something about the fifth elephant or the three little bears or whatever strikes your fancy, or you can use the existence of the number prompt to write something that doesn't revolve around an animal if you're sick of doing animals, or you can do each prompt separately, or you can ignore the numbers and stick with animals.
Remember, no matter what may change in my perspective on this project, our motto for this month is still no rules, just write.
On that note, last week when I sent out the first prompt email, I outlined a goal-based writing process I planned on following for myself, which was a variation on different processes I tried before launching NiNoBilMa. It almost immediately fell by the wayside, I think because I made it too complicated to be routine.
So here's what I'm doing this week:
The Week's Prompts:
1. Animals
2. Numbers
Each Day:
One, I will construct and tweet out a prompt in the form of a "whatever pops into my head" question that involves a randomly chosen number and a randomly chosen animal. For purposes of random selection, I will be using a d12 (twelve-sided gaming die) and the random animal list generator hosted at https://www.randomlists.com/random-animals, with recourse to the random word generator on the same site if I am stuck for a question.
For instance, for today I got the number 4, chickens, and the word "rude", so the question I'll be tweeting out after I send this is: Why was the fourth chicken the rude one?
Two, I will give a brief (one tweet) version of an answer to that question that will serve as my story seed, then I will walk away from the computer and do a few minutes of cleaning or exercise or other physical distraction while I think about it.
Three, I will return to my computer and start a stopwatch and a five minute timer, then begin writing. I will keep writing (or attempting to write) until the timer goes off, at a minimum. If I'm making consistent progress without feeling like I'm forcing myself, I'll keep going until it's becomes frustrating. Either way, I'll stop the stopwatch when I stop writing and record the time for the day.
I will be tweeting out each daily prompt I construct for myself using the #NiNoBilMa hashtag, but you might notice that I've also explained the format I'm using for creating them, which means if you don't like my prompt, you want more of them, or you don't want to wait for me to get them out, you can easily create your own that still follow the same format.
On Wednesday:
In the middle of the week, I'm going to set aside some time to hop on Twitter and do a longer warm-up game of the sort I was testing out last week. I definitely can't keep up with those all the time without it taking over a significant portion of my day, but I found it fun and some people found it useful.
By The End of the Week...
I expect myself to have myself five fragmentary vignettes, story openings, or very rough narratives based around arbitrary numbers and animals. If anything I produce using these exercises is more than that, better than that, or the start of something bigger, I'll consider that a bonus. I know at least one person who wrote a complete short story around the basic prompt of animal. If that's you, you're well ahead of the curve.
As my time and focus and interest allows, I'm going to try this same arrangement (pose a question to myself, answer it, step away from the computer, write on a short timer and a stopwatch) on other subjects in an attempt to build my "sit and write" muscles. I would like to discover, by the end of the week, that I have leveled up my ability to sit down and just start writing, no matter the subject.
Happy writing!