Notes on NaNoWriMo: How to Preptober (as a Very Busy Person)

Hello lovely internet!

As (I hope) you all know, I write novels. I’m also a full-time grad student, in the process of applying for more grad programs and funding next year. I also tend to fill my time with things like distance running, baking, and rock climbing. So, yeah. Pretty overscheduled to begin with.  But November… November’s a different beast.

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To me, November has become synonymous with National Novel Writing Month—in 30 days, participants aim to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. This year will be my 10th year participating in NaNo. Some of my previous NaNo projects have led to books—2013 NaNo led to Touchstones, 2016 Camp NaNo led to Light of the Oceans, 2016 NaNo led to Ghost Army, aka the sequel to Touchstones (which I’m hoping to finish editing and officially release in early spring of 2022!), and so on.

Every time I mention to someone what I’m doing each November, people look at me like I’m crazy. “Fifty thousand words?” they ask. “You must be joking.” Sometimes people look at me sideways and then acknowledge out loud, “that must require a lot of planning.” And that’s the point that I think matters most—planning.

There are two approaches to NaNo: you can be a planner or a pantser (i.e. flying by the seat of your pants).  I’m the kind of person who lives my life out of a color-coded Excel deadline spreadsheet and a bullet journal, bolstered by an online calendar. I should probably be a hardcore planner, but I’m not—I am what some people tend to call a “plantser,” where I make a clear-cut, organized plan, but I leave plenty of room for spontaneity. Why? Because writing is never, ever as linear as my outline and notes might make it seem.

That said, I do have some non-negotiable planning things that I make sure I do before every NaNoWriMo begins:

Story Threads— Like most creative folks I know, I usually have three to five potential writing projects rattling around in my head at any given point. But like many authors I know, I can only really focus on one at a time. This means that I only have one project actively turning into something novel-shaped (for me right now, that’s the sequel to All the Way Home), but I have multiple ideas and concepts that I’ve been playing with mentally for months now. I like to call this the “Ooh, Shiny! Phenomenon,” in which I focus on one piece and regularly get distracted by other ideas that I want to write about someday. Obviously, I can’t, so these ideas go into a “dump sheet,” where I jot down random ideas that I can’t let myself have brainspace for right now. At the moment, some of those concepts include… pirates, casket brides, Greek patron god relationships, magical scavenger hunts, queer romance, Viking magic, and cursed blades. Which, as you can imagine, is A Lot. So, in these weeks leading into NaNo, I take these disparate threads and start brainstorming how to bring them together—not beginning to weave the story, so to speak, but selecting a color palette and a texture. Some of those combinations won’t work, so I have to give myself time to play around with it.

Choosing a Vibe. There’s probably a better way to phrase this process, but this is what I’m going with. Of character, setting, mood, and conflict, I find that I usually start my books with some combination of setting and mood. Doing so allows me to figure out what the general aesthetic of my written world will look like, what kinds of conflicts might arise, what kind of characters that environment might produce. It’s a very anthropological approach to writing, honestly—people are informed by the worlds around them, so if I want to understand the characters I haven’t written yet, I have to start with the setting and the darker undercurrents running underneath it. In some ways, this process is really just genre selection: if I’m writing something set in a sunny field and a cute café in a small town, odds are I’m writing a rom-com. If I’m setting something in a military compound and a hospital, it’s something else entirely. Sometimes I’ll make a mood board, or I’ll start drawing maps, or just reading a lot in the genre I’m about to write.

Question words! Once I have a vibe to go for, I can start asking questions—as a historian, I usually revert to basic question words (who, what, why, when, where, and how) for any research, including my own totally fictional work. For a novel, that looks something like this:

WHO: are my characters?
WHAT: are they doing? What brings them together? What is their goal?
WHEN: does my story take place? What does the pacing look like?
WHERE: does the story happen? What does the setting look like? What parts of this setting are populated, and by whom?
WHY: are any of these people doing this? Why are they here? Most importantly, what do they want?
HOW: do these characters interact with one another? What are those dynamics? How does their environment inform their actions? Etc.

Once I have basic answers to those questions, I feel fairly comfortable starting to outline a rough plot. I tend to use a 3-to-5-act structure, but that’s not really important here—plenty of authors use totally different methods to structure their books. What does matter, I think, is getting a very basic “this is what happens” down on paper. For me, that’s chapter headings and bullet points, because my writing tends to happen very chronologically. That’s more complicated for people who write in flashbacks or with multiple timelines at play, but I still think it’s important to have a basic structure down on paper.

I gather my sources, and immerse myself in them if I can. Ignore what you’ve heard, no one just writes a book out of nothing. If I’m writing something historical, I research the period I’m writing in (yes, even if I think I know everything about it). I’ll watch YouTube videos about things like sword-forging, mountain-summitting, the theoretical physics behind spaceship engineering. It’s okay if I don’t totally understand it all, but I need to know enough to write about it without writing myself into avoidable knowledge gaps. Sometimes I even pick up new ideas that lead to extra plot points, or I learn that something I wanted to write about is totally unrealistic and needs some rethinking.

I go back to the outline, and try to turn it into something relatively story-shaped—in order, with some beats written in, with conflicts and climaxes, and travel plans and all of that. In an ideal world, knowing where my characters are and what they’re doing and why helps to avoid “scooby-dooing,” which is a term that my parents coined when reading an early draft of Light of the Oceans:it’s when my characters just kind of run from place to place doing pointless side quests while I try to figure out what they’re really doing. Having a solid outline down on paper doesn’t always work completely, but it usually helps.

And then… I leave it there. I know, y’all would expect me to have everything pre-drafted down to the last bit of dialogue, and then spend my writing time turning bullet points into paragraphs. But I don’t. I think pre-planning everything down to the last period is counterproductive—stories are fluid, and they change while I write them. I rarely get more annoyed than when I watch a TV show or read a book and they clearly planned an ending from the beginning and didn’t let it change to match how the story evolved (How I Met Your Mother and Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life both irritated me quite a bit). Shows like Orphan Black and books like The Starless Sea or The Invisible Life of Addie Larue feel much more natural to me—they’re clearly meticulously planned, but there’s a little room left for evolution and the story is much stronger for it. I’m aware that I can’t plan everything down to the last detail, because I know that something’s going to deviate from the plan at some point. And that’s important, too– things aren’t going to go according to plan. That’s just a fact. So be prepared for that, and don’t beat yourself up about it too much if/when it happens.

I also make sure to keep an eye on my schedule through October—if there are hard deadlines that I know will trip me up in November, I do as much work as I can ahead of time in October. For me right now, that’s my statement of purpose for grad apps, a few book reviews for my classes, and outlines/annotated bibliographies for final papers. I also send emails out to my clients, requesting that if they have work for me through November, they send it to me by October 15th so that I can make sure it gets scheduled in.

Now you might be thinking, this sounds like so much work, is it really worth it? And you’re not exactly wrong. A whole book in a month can be an undertaking. And I’m already spending 30-40 hours/week on my MA, and another 20 hours on things like my job, graphic design clients, and this blog, not to mention time for working out, DnD, and socializing. So yes, it can be a lot. But… I also tend to write books during the week anyway? I usually devote a good 15-30 hours per week to that as is, and I usually end up with 30k words/month. So all I’m really doing is approaching NaNo with a little more focus than my usual projects, and budgeting my time for an extra 5ish hours/week. It’s hard, yes. But it’s doable.

I could write a whole post about why NaNoWriMo is a worthwhile endeavor—and also why for some authors, it’s actually kind of counterproductive. For me, it was the mechanism that led to my first novel, and many of the ones that followed. Writing every single day taught me a lot about how to structure my time, how to make time for creativity, and how to code-switch between academic writing and novel-ing. It’s also a social community, full of advice, commiseration, and people willing to psych up fellow NaNo-ers. NaNo was and continues to be a really important tool for me—but it’s just that, a tool. If it works for you, great. If not, I’m sure there’s something else out there that will. Likewise, these strategies are just my approach—if you want to try them out, great. I hope they’re helpful for you. I am just one voice among many with advice! When it feels like way too much work, it’s okay to pare down and simplify! If you feel woefully underprepared, an extensive process can help put you on more solid footing!

What are your favorite ways to manage your time going into a chaotic writing month? What are some of your favorite Preptober steps? For anyone looking to get into NaNo this year, feel free to check out this post I wrote all the way back in 2015, or comment with any questions you’d like me to answer!

Happy prepping!