If you’re participating on National Novel Writing Month – also known as Nanowrimo or just Nano – it would do you well to spend the previous month preparing for the event. And what do we call such a month? Preptober, of course!
Writing fifity thousand words in 30 days is a big ask even for seasoned writers and preparing your story well means that it’s easier to keep the momentum going instead of wasting time staring at the blank screen. But what should you do for Preptober? How can you prepare for Nanowrimo? Keep reading to find out!
Related reading: How to win Nanowrimo – Tips for writing efficiently
Why do you need to “prep” for Nanowrimo? Can’t you just write?
You can do absolutely anything you want. Back in my day on Tumblr, there were a lot of posts with “tips” for stuffing your word count, and if you just want to write 50k words for the sake of writing and then abandon your story, go right ahead. There are many reasons for wanting to take part in Nanowrimo and none of them are more correct than others.
However, if you want to write a story that you can keep working on after that fateful November, you’ll do yourself a favour if you write a story that makes sense and isn’t just a pile of words.
Sometimes I get very young and green writers reading my blog who might not have yet realised how writing books works, so here’s a quick intro: A story is more than just a bunch of events one after another – it’s like a puzzle where all the pieces work together and their common thread is cause and effect. Editing a story is also a lot more than just looking for typos and grammatical errors.
So if you’re planning to use Nanowrimo to write a story that you could proudly share with other humans and not just your cat, it’s worth doing some preliminary work unless you already have a very strong understanding of how stories and story structure work.
You don’t need to do everything in this post if it doesn’t vibe with you but any of these techniques will make it easier for you to actually finish writing your Nano without pulling out too much of your hair.
How planning helps you write
Maybe you’re now sold on the idea of planning your story beforehand and using Preptober to prepare your Nano story but you might still not see how planning is actually going to help you.
Do you have multiple hours each day to work on your writing? I don’t! If you’re one of those writers who spends a lot of time talking about writing and posting memes about not writing, you probably have more time for writing than most writers who actually get their writing done. It doesn’t make any sense, and yet here we are.
When you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate on your writing but you do have a plan, you can spend your time a lot more efficiently than without a plan. If you can write for half an hour, how many minutes of that can you afford to spend wondering what to write next? Something closer to zero, I imagine.
Having a plan gives you a bird’s eye view of your story. That means you can indentify problems before you write them and you get a feel of if you actually like this particular story or not. How much time and headache is that going to save you? Just imagine.
Now, let’s begin peparing for Nanowrimo.
How to create moodboards for Nanowrimo
I don’t personally create a lot of moodboards for my stories but they’re such a fun way to get into the mood of your story.
A moodboard can help you see your story world better. You need to be able to describe where your characters are and they need to be able to interact with their setting. Finding pictures that represent your story world can really help with that.
When you need to get a lot of writing done in a short period of time, being able to really feel your story can help you stay inspired and in the mood for writing. Of course, professional writers write even when they’re not inspired or in the mood, but you might not be quite there yet, and who would say not to extra inspiration anyway?
To get more tips for creating your moodboard, you can read this post. You also learn about moodboards in my popular post about “all vibes and no plot”.
How a playlist can help with writing inspiration
A writing playlist can also be something that puts you in the right mood for writing your story and it can help you separate your Nanowrimo writing time from other tasks you do on the computer. Just put on your playlist when you work on your Nano to make it feel less like homework!
In addition, the act of creating your playlist can help you get a better understanding of your story and especially of its mood. If you were writing a romantic story but your playlist is mostly Evanescence, that probably says a lot about what type of romance you’re writing!
Here are some ideas for what to put in your Nanowrimo playlist:
- soundtrack music from movies or shows that are similar to your story (either to its content or just “vibe”)
- songs that share a name with a character in your story (easy if you’re writing about a Caroline, for example)
- instrumental songs that make you feel like you’re in your story world
- songs with titles that inspire you or that remind you of your story
- songs with lyrics that inspire you or that remind you of your story
- songs that your characters would listen to
- music from the period you’re writing about
What is your story ABOUT? Figure this out during Preptober
Making moodboards and playlists can be helpful but it’s just a warmup. Next, you need to figure out what your story is actually about.
Find your premise
First of all, you need a premise for your story. It’s the central idea that keeps you on the right track and it should have inherent conflict baked into it.
For example, let’s think about Titanic. Not the movie necessarily, but the actual ship and what happened. Yes, you could write a romance about two characters on the ship, that’s definitely one way to approach it. But if you were writing about Titanic, your premise could also be something like “When a grand ship’s captain gets the job of his dreams, what he actually gets is a workday from hell” or it could be “After a master criminal gets saved from the wreck of the ‘indestructible’ Titanic, she vows to turn her life around”.
All of those examples are “writing about Titanic” but they’re still wildly different takes on the same subject. If you don’t have your premise before you start writing, you’re probably going to take quite a few wrong turns along the way. It’s like focusing your camera to the right object so that viewers understand what the subject of your photograph is.
Figure out your theme
No matter what you might think, every story has a theme. In fact, every story has a lesson – not just those cautionary tales that warn you about the dangers of tobacco and loose women. Even memoirs have a theme, because instead of just cataloguing facts and events, you’re actually trying to say something with the memoir.
So what is a theme? It’s what you want to say with your story, something about the world and about people. Do you remember How I Met Your Mother? Sure, the premise must have had something to do with Ted’s quest for finding the mother of his children who are listening to his long and winding story for a decade, but I would say the theme of the show is more like “lovers may come and go but your friends will stay even when they grow up”.
That said, you don’t always have to have your theme ready before you write. Sometimes you unearth it only after you really get into writing your story or you might even change your mind about what it could be. Still, have a little think about what the choices your characters make have in common. That should always lead you to your theme.
Should you do worldbuilding or research?
To make a rough distinction, worldbuilding is for imaginary settings and research is for real settings. In reality, though, there can be some overlap. You might research medieval clothing for your fantasy story and you might invent a whole new town for your story about Victorian England.
How much of either of those you want to do in advance is up to you. Some writers might prefer to be as prepared as you can be before writing and some might prefer doing most of the research as they go.
If you’re writing a fantasy or scifi story and you’re starting completely from scratch, it’s a lot easier to write when you’ve got most of your world figured out. Have a little think about geography, what kind of people or other creatures populate your world, what kind of social classes there are, what types of jobs people do and what is a regular day like for people in your world.
If you’re writing historical fiction or something that takes place somewhere you’re not personally familiar with, you at least need to know something about the places that are directly mentioned in your story. What kind of social norms are there? What is the geography like and the buildings and human settlements? What do people wear and what are their regular days like? How’s the weather?
Some of the smaller details you can figure out as you come across them, and I recommend keeping a list of stuff you need to research and then doing all your googling and Wikipedia reading outside your designated writing time. That way you’ll actually make progress instead of getting stuck researching the intricacies of medieval underwear.
To get more help with planning your story world, here’s a post about writing a fantasy novel and here’s one about doing research for historical fiction. I’ve also written about writing seasons in your story setting.
How to plan your characters during Preptober
There are many ways of planning the characters that appear in your stories. Some like sticking to actual facts about the characters, like hobbies and friends and life goals, and some just want to tackles the character arcs, as in the inner journeys and transformations that the characters go through in your story.
Personally, I don’t spend a lot of time on planning the details of my characters because I can always see them so clearly in my mind as if they were real people I’ve known for years. When I’m planning my story’s characters, I focus on what they want, what’s stopping them from getting what they want, how the events of the story change them and how they turn out at the end of the story.
In the very least, I recommend you write a list of all your characters, what their function in the story is (if nothing, chuck them) and what is their relationship to the protagonist and/or to the antagonist. Then you can start fleshing them out the way you find most useful.
Something I also focus on during this planning stage is the dynamics between characters. What are they to each other? How do they feel about each other? How do they interact? Draw charts of your characters and try to connect them in as many ways as possible – that creates a richer, more interesting story.
I’ve recently created The Ultimate Character Workbook and I’d love it if you gave it a try! You can find it in my Etsy shop Writer Lifestyle and you can get 20% off with the code BOOKFRIENDS.
Should you plan your plot during preptober?
To stop your story from being a sequence of random events instead of a story, you need to plan your plot somehow. It doesn’t have to be more than a bullet point list of all the important plot events but if can also be extremely detailed – whichever works for you the best.
What’s the smallest number of plot events you can get away with planning? I’d say three!
- The arrival of a big problem that changes everything
- Another big event in the middle that forces your protagonist to change tactics
- One last dramatic event where your protagonist solves the problem (or gets succumbed by the problem)
On their own these events don’t yet make a story – you need to figure out what leads 1 into 2 and 2 into 3. Everything that goes in the middle needs to be guided by cause and effect.
You also need to understand that your protagonist can’t jump from 1 straight into 3. They’re not yet the person who can solve the problem, or otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem and you wouldn’t have a story. You need CHANGE and it’s the events of your story that bring about that change, and it’s the changed character who can solve that Big Problem.
Here are some more blog posts about planning a story: How to plan a story in 4 steps, Start from your character to plan a story, How to structure a story, Easy ways to outline your story, Do you need a scene outline?
Get my Nanowrimo workbook PDF “Outline A Novel in 30 Days” from Etsy
I admit, I didn’t specifically have Preptober in mind when I first created Outline Your Novel in 30 Days but I think we can agree it’s perfect for planning your Nanowrimo story. You even get one extra day for planning since October is 31 days, or you can take a day off for Halloween. (I’m getting a new tattoo and going to a concert on October 31st 2024 so it’ll be quite an exciting day for me even without outlining.)
Anyway, if you want to create a thorough plan for your Nanowrimo project, this ebook and the extras will help you achieve exactly that. You can also use it for planning any of your future stories no matter what the month is.
If you’d like even more help with your planning, my Outline Your Novel in 30 Days course has even more material that’s going to make planning your story a breeze. You’re welcome!
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
