National Novel Writing Month is quickly approaching and there isn’t much time left to prepare. If you are a little stumped on how to kick it into high gear for the month of November then here are a few tips to get you started.

  1. Register to participate in National Novel Writing Month by going on their website at http://www.nanowrimo.org/ and begin brainstorming ideas for your novel. (Develop a plot that you feel you have a viable story to tell)
  2. Finalize your idea and begin working on your character sketches. (This is when you give your characters a background story, how they grew up, what they look like, etc.)
  3. Now that you have your idea settled and have visualized and created your characters, sketch out your setting. (Put your story in a place, be it fictional or otherwise. If it’s a fictional setting you are going to need to create your own atmosphere and town and street names. It might be best to create a map of your city and town. If it is a real place than this is when your research comes into play)
  4. Conduct all of the research that is necessary for your story and for creating your setting. (This includes places and the culture of them, occupations of your characters, and mental or psychological disorders that your characters might have, police procedures if you are writing a detective story, forensic science if you are writing a murder mystery, etc.)
  5. Begin drafting your novel outline.
  6. After you have finished the first draft of your outline, go over it, change anything that you want to change and do any further research that you deem necessary.
  7. Rewrite, or rather type up, your final draft of your novel outline along with character and setting sketches. Print out the outline and sketches.
  8. Begin mapping out your schedule for how you are going to fit in your writing for the month of November.
  9. Begin letting everyone around you know that you are going to be busy for the month of November writing your novel.
  10. On November 1st begin writing your novel.

Now it is not easy to create an outline so don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can put this off up until the very last minute. There is a lot of thought, and time that goes into planning out your story and getting the research done for it that is necessary. However, if the way you work best is to just wing it and jump into the novel writing process without knowing what is going to come next, then by all means dive right on it. Hope you all have great success at your potential novels and try and have fun while you write. Happy NanoWrimo!

 

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor