Day 2: The premise

Last year when I participated in NaNoWriMo, I started with absolutely NO idea what I wanted to write about. I had no plot, no characters, no setting, no ANYTHING. I had the crazy idea that if I started with a single line ("The first line, like the next step, is always the most difficult"), I'd be able to free-write my way into some sort of story. Instead, I spent the first three days producing nearly 6,000 words of free-written crap. It wasn't that there weren't some interesting sentences and paragraphs in amongst the mess...there just wasn't any discernable story-line to pursue as I flitted from one possible character (and subsequent narrative dead-ends) to another.

Last year, I didn't happen upon an idea of what to write about until November 3rd; this year, I tried to hit the ground running. Although I don't have the sort of plot outlines, character sketches, and research notes that many more organized writers start with, I have a basic premise, based upon this picture. Although I don't know exactly who that Painted Lady is, she's the muse of this year's NaNo novel, in which a college prof (someone like me, but not me) becomes fascinated with a creepy house in her neighborhood, a mysterious packet of unopened letters she finds in her cellar, and the revealed connection between that house and those letters.

I'm not sure what that "slowly revealed connection" is exactly: it feels like I'm writing a mystery, and even I don't know whodunit, or even what sort of crime was committed. But I have a main character, a rough premise for a developing plot, and a quickly scribbled idea for the first five chapters. So word-counts notwithstanding, I'm ahead of where I was last year, at least in the idea department.

So, how about you? What promising (or paucity of) premises are you working with? Do you prefer to make things up as you go along, or do you prefer to have a roughly charted plan?

Word-count: 2,059

Last line: Turning her attention from Rebecca's cell phone conversation, which loudly continued, to the gray sleepy world around her, Alexa saw her neighborhood slowly drifting by as her hip-wading fireman pulled her aluminum boat like Charon ferrying souls across the River Styx.