Prep Phase: To Pants, Plot or Somewhere In Between?

There are many different approaches to NaNoWriMo - and none of them is the best way for everyone. Some people like to start the month with a blank document and see what comes to them as they write. Others like select a genre and have the most basic idea - perhaps a major character and their primary conflict. Some prefer to have a much clearer idea of what they will be writing, creating character sheets, elaborate plot outlines and worldbuilding to their heart's content.

Others fall elsewhere on the spectrum.

Personally, I embrace the official line of thinking regarding working on something new - if you are too attached to your project when you start, you will have a harder time writing as quickly as NaNoWriMo requires because of the quality level. If you've been thinking about a project for years, you will have a hard time letting go and allowing for glaring mistakes to creep into your draft. Your inner editor will be louder and more fiesty, and generally harder to shush.

My approach starts with something fresh, a new idea. It requires a premise, a character cheat sheet, an 'ideas' cheat sheet and nothing else. If I plan too much, I get too invested and that makes me write more slowly and cautiously. If I plan too much, I get frustrated when new tangents present themselves but I feel like I can't explore them because PLOT OUTLINE. It makes me want to write linearly, which means if I'm really stuck, I can't skip ahead to an easier scene. And most importantly? It means I get bored. All of these things spell disaster for me when I'm doing NaNoWriMo. 

If I don't plan at all? I inevitably run into a wall and have no ideas for how to get out. My story has no direction and I panic and flail and give up.

I need to be armed with a basic idea of where I'm going and some tools to get me out of the weeds, but nothing too rigid!

Genre

Know your genre and its expectations. Know why you want to write in a particular genre - do you love reading it? Do you watch a lot of television in this genre? Perhaps you've written this genre before? Have some familiarity with your genre. Know the tropes and common elements - both so you can avoid them if you like, but also so you can fall back on them if you hit a real wall.

Premise

I always want to have a core idea - a sentence or two that gives me a couple of characters with a goal and a conflict. They don't need to be pretty, or spot on - they just need to give me a sense of where things are going to go. These sentences will give me the start of my cheat sheets, and they will get me through the month. These sentences also give me the grounds for brainstorming - who is involved, what are they trying to do, what goes wrong?

Characters

I usually want my main character - I tend to write in either first or limited third person. I will want to have the basic details: name, general appearance, personality and goals. I also want a sense of who there is in that person's life, but only in very basic terms: annoying co-worker, klutzy friend, lenient boss, sexy vampire lover. I don't want to get a lot of specific details because too many will make me feel locked in and also obligated to use the character. 

Names

Names are one of the hardest part of character-creation for me. I have a really tough time coming up with the exact right name for a character, and trying to find one from the various available resources (more on these in a later post) can suck up hours of precious writing time during November. So my strategy during the Prep Phase is to make a list of potential names. This list will be ten or twenty names long, and whenever I write a character in November whose name doesn't immediately come to me, I'll grab a name from this list. The name might not be the perfect fit, but it'll work as a placeholder for this draft, and because I take the time to prep this list, I know that at the least, I like the names for whatever universe I'm working in.

Plot

Do not outline. At least, I do not outline. Instead, I recommend brainstorming ideas for concepts to include in your draft - these can be characters, scenes ideas, crazy items that you want to make use of, settings that you really like, a conflict - anything you can sum up in four or five words. "Epic rap battle between gnomes," "haunted house," "charity misusing donations to buy alcohol" - these are all good ideas for a cheat sheet. Some might get a little longer: "Joe confronts Claudia about missing page in book," "Mariah plays D&D for the first time", "killer uses toaster and a lime."

These ideas will be your 'get out of jail free' cards during November. Use them when you get stuck and have no idea what should happen next. Once you've started writing, you may also find your brain drawing a map of your story through your idea cheat sheet, and that is completely cool. Don't lock anything in, but instead let yourself play with the possibilities. 

I like to have a list of 20-30 ideas before I start the month. More is always better. One year I assembled these ideas into a vague order that I might use them in, but whenever I got stuck, I never hesitated to grab them out of order.