Free No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty Page B

affordable machine called an Alphasmart
    (www.alphasmart.com). This is a battery-powered, word-processing device that looks like a cross between a laptop and a children’s Speak & Spell. The miniscule screen only displays four lines of text or so at a time, which can be helpful in warding off obsessive editing. The keyboard is large and comfortable, and you can work for up to 700 hours on a few AA batteries. If you’re not ready to drop a couple hundred dollars on a new machine, though, don’t worry: A desktop computer, PDA with fold-out keyboard, a even a manual typewriter will do fine. Go with whatever you have access to; NaNoWriMo participants have successfully written entire 50,000-word novels using everything from voice-recognition software to a pencil and paper.

A REFERENCE BOOK
    When you start writing, you’ll find grammatical and style questions popping up immediately. Are quotes always set off from descriptive text with indents? How do you handle parenthetical comments that are actually stand-alone sentences? Are you supposed to italicize internal monologues?
    A professional editor would tell you to pick up a usage guide like William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style or, even worse, the Chicago Manual of Style. I find both books to be awkwardly laid out and dangerously sleep-inducing. So in the interest of keeping momentum while I write, I keep a copy of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity close at hand to use as a template for formatting or style issues. Any book you know and love is a perfect candidate for a reference novel, but this is also a great opportunity to pamper yourself by buying a novel you’ve been wanting to read for a long time.

MUSIC
    Music is the most potent writing drug available without a prescription. Before you start writing, amass as many songs as possible that might be conducive to noveling. Every novel, explicitly or not, has a soundtrack. Finding that soundtrack, and listening to novel and scene-appropriate music as you write, will help you slip into the sensual realms you’re describing. Whether you’re tapping into the hyperbolic violence of a horror novel or the prim grace of a historical romance, there’s some complementary music out there eager to help you get it written.
    I’m a big fan of movie scores, as they tend to be overly dramatic in all the right ways. When your character is striding off for the final showdown with the landlord or the face-eating remora, you don’t want to have the Bee Gees cooing about dance fevers in the background. You want the epic rumble of kettle drums and the spiraling scream of an overheated string section. Yaaar!
    Whatever your musical predilections, plan on creating loads of energy-bolstering mixes for your writing plunge. Or, if you have a fast Internet connection, take advantage of online radio stations such as Radio Netscape (www.netscape.com), w here dozens of genre-specific streams are ready to fulfill your every soundtrack whim.
    -------------------HEARING VOICES: THE POWER OF HEADPHONES
    When writing a novel, I always wear large, ear-covering headphones. Sometimes I even remember to plug them into my CD player.
    I like wearing headphones because they help dampen the clatter of the outside world without giving me the closed-off, scuba-diver feel that earplugs tend to. And when they’re hooked up to a CD or MP3
    player, headphones shove the music directly into my brain in beautiful, cinematic ways, adding lovely contours to the rough edges of my thoughts and amplifying my sentences as they come spraying out onto the page.
    Headphones, with or without music, also create a social buffer around you. This is especially helpful if you are a woman trying to get your novel written in a cafe. For a certain type of gregarious person (read: man), the sight of someone with a furrowed brow typing madly on a laptop in a public place sends the following very clear message: “I am not working on anything important; please come bother me.” Headphones