Getting Ready for Nanowrimo? Let's Get Organized!

Nanowrimo will be here before we know it! Are you planning on participating this year? There are so many moving parts to crafting a novel, and you want to be sure you have everything in order so you can dedicate all of your time in November to writing. To help you get ready, in the months leading up to November, we’re going to dedicate a blog each month to talking about ways you can make sure you and your book idea are ready to go for Nanowrimo.

This month, we’re talking about one of the basic foundations for writing: the plot! There are a lot of reasons that someone might not be able to write 11,700 words a week for the entire month of November, but one of the big reasons is that the writer’s basic idea was a little too basic to drive an entire plot. If you don’t have your synopsis and basic outline planned out enough, it can be tough to know where to take your story when you sit down to write just shy of 2,000 words every day for a month. (You might end up like Nick Miller from New Girl with a Z is for Zombie situation.) So let’s break down ways you can make sure your story is fully mapped out and you’ve made a clear writing path for yourself come November.

Outline

Outlines can be tough to craft. Some writers love them, some writers hate them, but when you’re embarking on something like Nanowrimo, it’s important to make yourself a basic outline to help you plan out your writing. The point of Nanowrimo is to write every single day. The words don’t have to be perfect; you just want to get them on the page. Because of this, you don’t want to have to waste time dreaming up storylines or deciding where to take your plot. As best as possible, you want to know where you’re taking the story when you sit down for that day’s writing session. That’s why an outline is so important to Nanowrimo, even if you’re not normally the type to use one. This is going to serve as the basic map to your book, and it’ll be your first real chance (but certainly not your last, so it doesn’t have to be perfect) to look at the scope of your story and find places that don’t make sense, plot lines that might be dropped, or areas that might need to be rearranged.

The good news is, there isn’t really a wrong way to craft an outline, and you can get as basic or as fancy as you’d like (seriously—just Google something like “book outline templates” and you’ll get thousands of results). As long as you’re able to read, understand, and follow your outline, it’s a functional one.

While you don’t need to put every detail in an outline, you do need to give yourself enough to make those 2,000 words as easy as possible to generate every day. Here are a few guidelines. Use each main point to cover big moments in the plot, and then use your sub-point to line out how your story will get from one plot point to the next, as well as any minor plot points that flesh out the story. If you really want to get fancy with it, you can color code or use unique formatting to help you differentiate and track things like specific storylines, timelines, or characters. However, font changes, bold, italic, underlining, and inserted comments can be just as helpful, even if they might not look as aesthetically pleasing. As long as you can follow the map you’ve given yourself, you’ve got a great outline.

Character Descriptions

It’s not uncommon to hear authors talk about dreaming about their characters or talking about them as if they were real friends. And that’s because after an author spends so much time with each of their characters, they’ve become vibrant, real, and as multifaceted as any other real-life person might be.

However, when you’re first starting your story, that’s simply not going to be the case. And oftentimes it will take a bit of writing (and even a few drafts) to really nail down the specifics of a character. You can give yourself a head start by building a character profile: motivations, triggers, struggles, pertinent backstories that may or may not show up in the book, and anything else that can help you know the character. The more, the better. Ultimately, novels are built on the characters within them, so even though your plot will evolve as you revise and edit, if you can base it on a foundation of vibrant, engaging characters, you’re starting on solid ground.

Just like the outline, this isn’t your last time to get to tweak a character description, but if you can go into the rush of Nanowrimo essentially understanding what you want each character to be, you can hopefully make choices for them that align with who they are. Like an outline, this doesn’t have to look a certain way. Some authors like to create mood boards for their characters or find pictures online of people they think look like their characters. Some authors like to write about their characters in long form. Others might like to use something like a character sheet from Dungeons & Dragons. As long as the character description is something that you can easily reference as you’re writing, it works!

Timeline

If you hate outlines, chances are you also hate drafting timelines. However, just like an outline can help guide you in the day’s writing, a timeline can help you understand the scope and direction of the story. If you’re writing a story that spans decades, it makes sense that a timeline can help keep you on track. However, when you’re writing so much content in such a short period of time, knowing the space of time in which your story takes place (and any pertinent backstory) is key.

Let’s look at my favorite example of wacky timelines: the Twilight Saga. If you’re unfamiliar with the stories, they’re about a high school girl named Bella Swan who meets a mysterious boy in her class and falls in love with him even though he’s a vampire. She quickly decides she wants to spend the rest of eternity with him as a vampire, and the story culminates with the two of them marrying, having a baby, and Bella turning into a vampire as she nearly dies in childbirth. A teenager going from regular girl to so in love that she’s willing to devote her eternity to one guy, get married, have a kid, and become a member of the undead has to take a long time, right? That’s a lot of big decision-making, a lot of relationship-building, a lot of soul-reckoning, and just a lot of growth that has to happen, right? These books must’ve spanned well over five years, right? Right?

Wrong. The entire Twilight Saga, all four books, Bella’s journey from normal teen to vampire mom and wife, takes a whopping twenty-four months. Obviously, the entire series dabbles in the fantastic, so the need for a “realistic” timeline is debatable. 

When you map out your story ahead of time, it will not only help you keep everything straight and ensure you’re referring to events properly, but it will also allow you to see if timelines don’t quite add up or if the amount of time you’ve allotted for an event doesn’t make sense.

Ultimately, Nanowrimo is a mad dash to the end of November, and the ultimate goal is to write, not to get anything perfect. But if you want your Nanowrimo book to be a starting place for your own publishing journey, giving yourself as many guides and maps to follow each day of the month will not only ensure that you’ll meet your goal of 50,000 words by the end of November, but it will give you a solid book to work with as you begin editing and revising.

Of course, if you want help with things like writer coaching or editing, we’re always here to help, both now and after Nanowrimo! Schedule a free consultation, and we can talk about the best ways we can partner to help you reach your publishing goals.