National Novel Writing Month (November) is almost here! I didn’t follow through on my commitment last year and I really want to write my 50,000 words this time around. Something I completely missed last year was all the prep work and making a plan for my writing time. If you also want to participate this year, there’s still time to plan and prep!
NaNoWriMo wants you to be successful, so visit their Prep page for all the details. They’ve got a six-step process that started back in September (yeah, I had no idea either) but I managed to get a lot done in one day and some things, like complex characters, may develop as you write.
- Develop a Story Idea (September 9-13)
- Create Complex Characters (September 16-20)
- Construct a Detailed Plot or Outline (September 23-27)
- Build a Strong World (September 30 – October 4)
- Organize Your Life for Writing! (October 7-11)
- Find and Manage Your Time (October 14-18)
This is the six step process. What’s really great about NaNoWriMo is that they have lots of tools to help with each step. To develop your story there’s an exercise sheet where you use story lines from books you loved and make changes until you have a story of your own, or borrowed characters, news stories, or inspirational photos. For character development there’s a questionnaire, a long and detailed one, for you to ask yourself about your characters and make them multi-dimensional. They also have helpful explanations, examples, and sheets on outlining your plot and building a world/backdrop for your novel.
For everything you need all in one place you can download the full Prep 101 Handbook.
It’s a little over 60 pages.
I made a copy, downsized some images and changed font sizes, pulled the character questionnaire to print a few copies of that alone, and got the handbook down to about 20 pages.
After working through some of the exercises I finished the roller coaster 5-point plot! I prefer to work with a story board so after I finalized the plot on the roller coaster plot print out I threw it on index cards and a cork-board.
There you have it, color coded and outlined! Bottom left is the setup and inciting incident in hot pink, rising action is above it in maroon, climax is in purple at the top, mid-to-upper-right is my falling action in blue, and the resolution & end is in black at the bottom right.
I printed all the worksheets and plan to expand on my roller coaster five-point plot (above) using the 9-point plot. Then I’ll work out more details in the 27-chapter outline and the Save The Cat, and finally use the Jot, Bin, Pants sheet to create scenes and dialogue. I’d like to get through all of these steps by the end of the month, but my absolute minimum goal is completing the Save The Cat phase.
Steps five and six are about everything but the book planning. Figuring out how much you need to write in a day, in a week, and which days of the week and times of day to squeeze in writing time, and sticking to it, will help reach your goal. If you want to map it out yourself ob a physical calendar, they’ve got a print out and you can use stickers to mark your success. Organizing and maximizing your time will make it little easier to get in that writing time.
After taking the quiz I ended up with the following time frames and word count goals:
The Structure: 2 40-minute writing sessions every weekday, 6 hours of writing every weekend
The Goal: 800 words every weekday, 4,250 words every day of the weekend. (If you’re shooting for 50,000 words.)
Fewer hours on work days or days when I have plans.
You can see my calendar and make a copy in google sheets to plan your own!
Aim for 40 hours, 50,000 words, and 1250 words per hour.
(I have about 46 hours just in case!)
(PS – I had to individually format each “hours” cell
to have it be either a rounded number or have a decimal,
so watch out for any partials being rounded up in view but not in value)
To maximize my time I am going to try to pump out the next few weeks’ (aka November’s) blog posts and have them pre-scheduled.
I also plan to do more meal prepping and have my husband handle the grocery shopping.
More than anything, the biggest help is going to be having my book on an easily accessible cloud platform (<- not sure I used “cloud” properly).
I have my book on Google Docs and I’ll update my word count manually in the NaNoWriMo project page while keeping track on my own in my calendar.
Happy Prepping!
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