No Plot? No Problem!: In Which a Planning Limit is Proposed (Gasp!)

September is officially the start of NaNo Prep! To celebrate, we’re excerpting what some might call the NaNoWriMo Bible:  No Plot? No Problem!  by founder Chris Baty. Today, he proposes a (perhaps controversial) approach to planning your novel:

It may be counterintuitive, but when it comes to novel writing, more preparation does not necessarily produce a better book. In fact, too much preparation sometimes has a way of stopping novel writing altogether.

As reassuring as it is to embark on your writing journey with a mule-team’s worth of character traits, backstories, plot twists, metaphors, and motifs, it’s also a 100-percent viable strategy to walk into the wilds of your novel with nothing but a bottle of water and a change of underwear.

The planners out there should feel free to completely bury their homes and apartments in plot notes, character lists, story outlines, city maps, costume drawings, evocative photos, and encouraging quotes. All with one catch: You only get one week, maximum, to research your book before you start writing it.

I know one week seems like a very short amount of time for laying out an entire novel, but trust me: It’s perfect. Seven days gives you enough time to get some good ideas on paper, but it prevents the deadly onset of overplanning, which is dangerous for three reasons:

1. If you give yourself too much time to plan, you might end up stumbling across a brilliant concept for your novel. And the last thing you want heading into your noveling month is a brilliant concept. Every year during National Novel Writing Month, I get emails from people jubilantly informing me that they’re dropping out of the contest because they’ve found a story that they love, and they want to work on it slowly enough to do it justice.

When I check in with these people six months later, they’ve inevitably stopped working on the book entirely. Why? Because they’ve become afraid of ruining their book by actually sitting down and writing it.

A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise. Once you stumble across a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime idea for a book, it’s hard to treat that story with the irreverent disregard needed to transform it from a great idea into a workable rough draft. When you just give yourself one week to flesh out your concept, you won’t have time to feel overly protective of your ideas. And you will therefore stand a much better chance of bringing them to life.

2. Past a certain point, novel planning just becomes another excuse to put off novel writing. You will never feel sufficiently ready to jump into your novel, and the more time you spend planning and researching, the more likely you’ll feel pressure to pull off a masterwork that justifies all your prewriting work. Give yourself the gift of a pressure-free novel, and just dive in after one week.

3. Prewriting, especially if you’re very good at it, bleeds some of the fun out of the noveling process. Nothing is more boring than spending an entire month simply inking over a drawing you penciled out months earlier. With the seven-days-and-out timeline, you’ll still have lots of questions about your book when you start writing. Which is great. It makes the writing process one of happy discoveries and keeps the levels of surprise and delight high for you as an author.

Excerpted by Michael Adamson, with permission from Chronicle Books.

Photo by Flickr user Giulia van Pelt.