I've been torturing myself with this for the past two days. I have no idea what to write about.

A guy who tortures himself.

I wonder how many stories have been written about writer's block.

I wonder how many good stories have been written about writer's block.

I've seen at least one in comic form (this particular strip is SFW, but most of the rest of oglaf.com is not, fair warning.)

Well Stephan King has written....oh.

Yeah, I kind of cheated, since I have a serial halfway done. I'm only counting my word count as of November 1st, of course.

However, I reached the end of what I had planned out before November started. So I'm kind of pantsing it from here. :)

how about?
sexually transmitted gender changing disease that you can only catch once, fall out to main character catching it and effects on society

breakdown of society as a aliens arrive, not as refugees or for conquest, but just to sell highly advanced stuff on a individual level with out bothering to deal with governments.

detective solving crimes committed by a group of recently made homeless who have decided to literally eat the rich

Writers block transferred as an std and you can write about each person.

So can anyone point me to an easily-understood and successful outline for a novel? I'm a fan of the Dresden Files, the Expanse series, Terry Pratchett, (most) Stephen King, and Hugh Howey's Wool cycle (though I've found his novel "Sand" rather wanting), if those are any indications of what I've read and enjoyed recently.

I keep seeing these weird models (I think someone had a snowflake-based novel outline, which made little to no sense) or pages of hand-written gobbledygook that looks like an epileptic tried to draw a spreadsheet (I think it was from JK Rowling). Is there a fairly simple, straightforward example of a plot outline that later became a novel, or is it all just a "throw it at the wall and hope you wind up with something coherent" thing most of the time?

Heh, I think you posted this right around the time I wrote the name 'Michael Moorcock' on my own post. Timing. :)

hehey! This was posted to old SE! Coolio!

Joseph Campbell's Twelve-Step Hero's Journey is a pretty well-trod path. Probably too well-trod, IMO, but hey, it's NaNoWriMo - the goal is to be done, not to be good, so whatever works.

(Personally I'm a bigger fan of starting with a really good what-if and just seeing where it takes you, outlines be damned. I find outlines more useful in the re-writing stages or for mapping out where things need to go when you're painted into a corner.)

What if rich businessmen paid big money to be shrunk down for "microsafari" hunts where they were pitted against rotifers, amoebae, stentors, and other horrifying creatures?

Hmm, maybe that's b-movie fodder rather than novel material. Anyway, I'll never bother writing it, so there you go. You'll need to take lots of artistic license with the physics of being that small.

Randy Ingermanson's snowflake method actually makes a lot of sense. I don't use it in its entirely, but I did take a few ideas from it when I figured out the best way to plot out my first NaNoWriMo novel. The general idea is to come up with a single topic sentence. Then break it down further into a paragraph. Then break it down into four paragraphs. It's a way of fractally expanding it and figuring out how to populate and fill in everything that has to happen for the story to work.

If you're looking for more the 'hero's journey' beat sheet style plotting method, then you can either go with the Campbell twelve step journey that hellboy mentioned up above, or with Blake Snyder's 'Save the Cat!' beat sheet, or Adron Smitley's 'A Stranger Comes to Town'. Those work well for generic adventure/hero's journey stories, but of course, if your idea isn't one of those, then stretching it to fit those beat sheets will just make for a weird, bland, nonsensical story.

Personally, I tend to write pulp, so I go with the 4 act structure used by many pulp authors. It's basically a more broken down version of the typical movie 3 act structure. With the 4 act structure, you basically break the story down into quarters. The first quarter is your introduction to the character, the setting, and whatever trouble they're getting into. The second act is when they're first getting into whatever trouble they're dealing with. The third act is when shit hits the fan and they get in so deep that they can't back out, they have to power through to the end in order to survive. And the last act is that struggle to survive. It's a structure that works for short stories, a la Lester Dent, or longer ones, like Michael Moorcock's early pulp.

Basically, the search to outline your book is usually a series of breaking down what you need in order to make the book work on every level. As a coherent plot, as a driving and interesting story for the reader, and as a driving force to keep the characters realistically going along. Different types of stories will require different types of structure behind them to make them work on those levels.

With my first NaNoWriMo novel, I was thinking about publishing it serially via podcast. I ended up doing a fractal structure. The book is the introduction to the series and world, and I can easily see myself writing it as a quadrilogy. The book itself has four acts. Each act has four long chapters. And each chapter has four mini-acts that are short enough to fill a 10-15 minute podcast.

That setup didn't quite work for the current project I'm working on. But this one I'm half pantsing, rather than going solely on an outline. But that's just as well, because this story has different needs than the previous one. The previous one was a third person fantasy epic. This one is a gritty, first person noir style cyberpunk dystopian story.

Oh, another thing I did for the outline on my first NaNo attempt that I actually forgot about until I just went back to look at the outline. :P Once I finished the outline, I went through each chapter and wrote in what function each chapter fulfilled in the book. What it did for the plot, for the characters, and for the readers. Mostly because I remember reading a few books from authors who I enjoyed, but who in their later books started to ramble on in certain parts, leaving huge plot swaths that deviated from the main plot and delivered absolutely fuck-all.

I'm looking at you, third Ringworld book.

Best of luck in reaching that damned goal!

Most I've ever written in one stretch was 20k words in about 10 days, but generally I'm a slow writer. I'll be heading back to Hawaii for a couple months pretty soon here and I'm going to flesh out a couple book ideas while there, maybe even complete one of them.

One is a coming-of-age story about 3 teenage boys living in an isolated small town that is known for yearlong clear blue skies, and how everything is effected by the appearance of a cloud. Working title is CLOUDY. (I suck at titles)

The other is a relationship drama set in a near-future world where apathy and nihilism has become the norm. The female half of the protagonists attempts to change for the male half and ends up becoming a giant feline statue that threatens to destroy the world. Working title is BEING UPSET AS THE SOUL OF IT. (I dunno, I haven't thought that one out fully yet, I'll play with it more)

Heh. I don't really care about reaching the goal, this is a story I'm gonna finish in a reasonable amount of time anyway. I'm intending to publish it as a serial, hopefully at least one podcast every other week. I've got twenty eisodes written, but I'd love to get ahead of myself and finish writing the whole novel/season as soon as possible.

Most years I start telling myself around August that this is the year I'll actually get around to writing something... and then forget all about it until, like, November 27th.

This year I actually remembered at the appropriate time, but I'm not even remotely motivated. I think I'm going to try to spend the month writing a video game instead.

Is there a month for that? I know February is 'write a music album' month, although I don't remember what the official name of it is.

I think the indie game scene has moved into the quick prototyping type event instead of a month long project, which I can understand as if you're limiting yourself in time you'll never make a polished game, and giving yourself too much time would just mean a lot of sitting around doing nothing.

Well, if the serial I'm writing actually does get popular, I may very well decide to find a few decent pixel artists and make a Prince of Persia style sidescroller based on it. :P

... okay, I'm also lazy enough that I may find a scripter/programmer so I don't have to do all of that too.

I always plan to take part but either I forget til a week into November, or I fail yo hit the targets and let myself get down about it and give up, this year I am writing but instead of aiming for targets I am just using Nanowrimo as a sort of prompt to try and write every day, if I get anywhere close to the target then huzzah, if not then I am at least writing.
And most of these ideas can be upgraded for a better project when I have more time.