NaNoWriMo – How to Write a Novel in 30 Days

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” ~ Richard Bach

NaNoWriMo is short for “National Novel Writing Month” (the “National” in the title has been rendered obsolete; NaNoWriMo is now a worldwide phenomenon). Every November tens of thousands of people from around the world aim to produce a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. It’s the perfect opportunity for would-be writers to nurture their creative selves.

Having a firm, short deadline puts the goal of writing a novel solidly within reach. Chris Baty, instigator of NaNoWriMo, explains that the key is to lower your expectations “from ‘best-seller’ to ‘would not make someone vomit’ “.

Some of the things you’ll need to keep in mind while writing your novel are the following:

• Genre
• Setting
• Characters
• Conflict
• Theme
• Plot
• Scenes
• Climax
• Point of View

I registered for NaNoWriMo this year–revealing masochistic tendencies which had thus far remained undetected–and I wrote this post mainly to help myself, since I’ve never attempted to write a novel before. Having said that, I hope that it encourages you to register for  NaNoWriMo as well–the registration is free– and that it offers you some guidelines you can put to good use as you get started on your NaNoWriMo adventure.

Incidentally, 50,000 words in 30 days is 1,667 words a day. So that’s probably one to two hours of work a day, every day, for thirty days.

photo credit: smittenkittenorig

The Basic Rules

There are NaNoWriMo rules, but only a few. Here they are:

1. Write a novel that is at least 50,000 words long between November 1 and November 30.
2. You can start outlining and researching your novel before November 1st, but you can’t start writing the novel before that date.
3. Be the sole author of your novel.
4. Upload your novel for word-count validation to the NaNoWriMo site between November 25 and November 30.
5. If you write 50,000 words, you won (no one from NaNoWriMo is going to read your work and judge its merit; or lack thereof).

Decide on a Genre for Your Novel

Genre is a term used to group together works that share similar characters, settings, and themes.  The basic genres are the following:

1. Action-Adventure
2. Drama
3. Mystery
4. Fantasy
5. Horror
6. Literary
7. Romance
8. Science-Fiction
9. Western
10. Satire

The best advice in choosing a genre is to write the type of novel that you like to read.

Theme

The theme is the central message of the novel which is conveyed through the characters and circumstances; it’s the statement you want to make about the human condition. In addition, it’s the unifying element for everything you put in your plot. Here are two examples:

• The theme of Shakespeare’s “Othello”, is jealousy.

• A main theme of the novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain is racism.

Setting: When and Where

Setting is the background in which the story takes place. Basically, it’s the when and where, but it can also include lifestyle:

(a) Place: This is the geographical location of the story; it’s the physical environment. Throughout the novel, the story may move from one place to another. Consider creating a map that shows where all the action will take place. This will help you gauge distances and figure the length of time necessary to move your characters from one place to another.

(b) Time: First, this refers to the period of history. Your story could be set in the past, it could be a contemporary novel, or it could even be set in the future. You have to decide at what point in time the story opens and when it will end.  When describing the setting you may want to specify the season, month, and even the time of day. Make a timeline for the events of the novel.

(c) Lifestyle: This refers to the daily life of the characters. If a story takes place in a particular historical period, the lifestyle of the characters–poor farmers or part of the aristocracy–is part of the setting.

“Wuthering Heights”–Emily Brontë’s only novel–takes place in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. All the action is set in or around two neighboring houses on the harsh and desolate Yorkshire Moors of Northern England: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.

These two manor houses are just four miles apart, but they could not be more different in terms of the conditions that exist in each house and the people who inhabit them. Emily Brontë grew up in the Yorkshire Moors, and so her depiction of it is very accurate.

Creating Character Profiles

How many main characters and supporting characters will you have in your story? Some authors prefer to come up with the basics of their characters and then simply allow their characters to reveal themselves as the story moves along.

However, a lot of experienced writers recommend that would-be authors create character profiles, at least of their main characters. This helps in bringing to life characters that are as real as possible, and in providing continuity throughout the story. How detailed you make your character profiles depends on what works best for you.

Some of the things you may want to jot down about your characters are the following:

• Age
• Appearance
• Occupation
• Income
• Education
• Marital status
• Recent relationships
• Children/siblings
• Likes and dislikes
• Favorite music
• Hobbies
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Special characteristics (movement, speech, laugh, and so on)
• Favorite sayings
• Idiosyncrasies
• Birth date/ Sign of the Zodiac
• Nickname

A rule of good storytelling is that the protagonist will confront the thing he fears the most and overcome it in order to win the thing he desires the most. (Source.)

Six More Things You Can Do

Six more things you can do when it comes to creating your characters are the following:

1. Write what a typical day looks like for your character.
2. Create your character’s backstory; even if you never include a word of the backstory in your novel, if you know your character’s past you’ll be able to make him or her more convincing to the reader.
3. Create a profile for each of your characters similar to those of popular socializing networks such as Myspace, Twitter, or Facebook.
4. Draw a family tree for the character.
5. Make a sketch of your character so that you can get a better idea of what they look like.
6. Research your character’s job or career if it’s different from your own.

Character Profile Worksheets

Here are some links where you’ll find worksheets to help you create character profiles:

• How to Create a Character Profile
• Character Creation Form
• Developing Fictional Character Profiles
• Creating Character Profiles
• Character Development Worksheet
• 100 Character Development Questions for Writers

The Plot: The Story and Why It’s Interesting

The plot is what happens in the novel and why it’s interesting. E.M. Forster explained the difference between story and plot in “Aspects of the Novel” as follows:

• “The king died and then the queen died” is a story.
• “The king died and then the queen died of a broken heart” is a plot.

Most plots are made up of the Classic Three Act Structure:

Act I. We meet the characters, are given the setting, and discover what the main problem of the story is. This is the preparation act for the reader (set it up).

Act II. The second act presents the complication. The problem that we set up in the first act becomes more dangerous and difficult. The hero’s attempts to solve the problem come crashing down and our hero is lying on his or her back with no apparent means of escape.

Act III. The resolution of the problem. In act three you wrap up the story and tie up loose ends.

Example: The Choking Doberman

Martha walked up the flight of stairs to her second floor apartment and wearily opened the door. As soon as she made her way into the apartment she was greeted by the sight of her pet Doberman pinscher choking and unable to breathe.





Filled with fear and anxiety, Martha rushed him to the vet and was told to leave him there for emergency surgery. Feeling a bit calmer knowing that her beloved pet was being looked after, she returned to her apartment.

No sooner had Martha set her purse down on the small table near the door, when the phone rang. She picked it up and was surprised to hear the vet’s voice urging her to get out of her apartment right away.


Martha quickly grabbed for her purse, ran out of her apartment, and knocked urgently on her neighbor’s door. Fortunately, Marge was home and she let Martha in. Martha told Marge of how she had come home to find her dog choking and of the bizarre phone call she had received from the vet.

A few minutes later the two women heard the sound of sirens nearing the apartment building. Four police cars screeched to a stop outside the building and several cops made their way up the stairs and into Martha’s apartment.

After waiting what she considered to be a prudent amount of time, Martha ventured out of her neighbor’s apartment to see what was happening. She was told by one of the cops that after a quick search of her apartment they discovered a burglar hiding in the bedroom closet bleeding profusely from one hand.

Analysis of “The Choking Doberman”

As Ronald Tobias explains in “20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them”, “The Choking Doberman”–which is an urban myth that has been retold countless times with endless variations–is completely plot driven; the characters take a backseat. In addition, it has three movements: the story is set up when the woman comes home and finds her pet Doberman choking. She takes the dog to the vet.

The second movement starts when the woman gets home and her phone starts ringing. A startling complication is introduced when the agitated vet urges her to get out of the house. The woman flees the house and the unknown danger.

The third movement begins with the arrival of the police, with the climax (the point of highest interest in the story) occurring when they tell her that they found a burglar hiding in her bedroom closet who had a finger bitten off by her Doberman. By the end of the story the mystery is solved.

Here are some more books that will help you craft a fabulous plot:

• No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days
• Plot & Structure: Techniques And Exercises For Crafting A Plot That Grips Readers From Start To Finish)
• Blockbuster Plots: Pure & Simple

photo credit: tinali778

Some Ideas to Save Your Plot

If your plot runs out of steam on day ten of NaNoWriMo, here are some things you can do:

1. Kill a main character.
2. Hit shuffle on your iPod and the first song that comes up is the title of your next chapter.
3. Your main character finds an old letter in a library book.
4. Include an element of betrayal: someone is having an affair or has lied about their past.
5. Flip through magazines or art books. Look through the newspaper. Cut out three items which you feel have potential to inspire an interesting scene.
6. Go people watching: sit at an outdoor café; go to the mall; ride the subway or the bus. Collect five snatches of conversation.
7. Write a list of words that are common to your genre and combine them in interesting ways to come up with titles for your chapters (dragon, castle, moat, knight). Once you have a title, create a plot twist based on that title.
8. Think of your family’s stories which you’ve heard your relatives retelling over and over again.
9. Think of an important, far-off goal your character is striving to reach and write about your character’s quest to achieve this objective.
10. Your character loses someone or something that is very dear to them.
11. Your character’s business is in trouble. Brainstorm ten possible ways to solve the problem. Choose the most unexpected approach to write about.
12. Steal from the best. Think of a novel you love, take elements from the plot, and make them your own.
13. Use social media for ideas (delicious, Stumbleupon, Twitter). Here’s something I found while stumbling: Armed Thieves Steal Magritte Painting in Daylight Raid.
14. Visit One Sentence or PostSecret.

Here are some books which will help you generate ideas if you hit a wall while writing your novel:

• How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists
• The Pocket Muse
• The Writer’s Idea Book
• The Writer’s Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination

Conflict: The Struggle

“Conflict is the source of all growth and is an absolute necessity if one is to be alive.” — Jean Miller

Conflict is the struggle between opposing forces in the story. Conflict provides interest and suspense. There are various types of conflict, which can usually be categorized as one of the following:

• A character struggling against nature.
• A struggle between two or more characters (relational conflict): Here it’s usually the protagonist and the antagonist competing or clashing with each other.
• A struggle between the main character and some aspect of society (social conflict): This is a human v. group conflict; the protagonist has a problem with a group of people.
• A struggle of opposing forces within one character (inner conflict).

Scene: Miniature Stories

Jordan Rosenfeld writes the following in his book “Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time”:

“Scenes are capsules in which compelling characters undertake significant actions in a vivid and memorable way that allows the events to feel as though they’re happening in real time. When strung together, individual scenes add up to build plots and storylines.”

A scene is a specific chunk of the story, one that is its own closed loop. When is a scene a scene? When something changes. What defines the completion of a scene? The moment of change. Every good scene has a purpose and it leads to the next good scene.

Point of View

Point of view is the perspective from which a story is told. Choose the point of view that will most effectively allow you to reveal your characters and tell your story. The points of view you can adopt are basically the following:

First Person

Everything in the first person point of view (POV) comes from one character’s perspective. We can only know what that character knows, and our knowledge may be skewed by that character’s biases. For example: “Twilight” is told from Bella Swan’s perspective (yes, I read the “Twilight” series, it’s one of my guilty pleasures):

“I’d never given much thought to dying-though I’d had reason enough in the last few months-but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.

Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.

I knew that if I’d never gone to Forks, I wouldn’t be facing death now. But, terrified as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision.

When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.

The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me.”

Third Person

This is the most commonly used – in other words, third person pronouns such as “he” or “she”.  When you write in the third person you have a couple of choices: omniscient, where you can hear the thoughts and see the action from any character’s perspective; objective, where only narration, dialogue and description is used to tell the story and we aren’t allowed into any character’s thoughts; and limited omniscient, where we see the story from one or a few character’s viewpoints and can hear only their thoughts.

Second Person

The second person point of view is uncommon – the “you” form.  Most stories we read are in the first or third person, so using the second person may confuse your readers. But if it suits your novel, then go for it.

More NaNoWrimo Tips

Here are some more NaNoWriMo tips:

• Don’t worry about the quality of your writing, just focus on getting to that 50,000 word target.
• Get into a routine and begin writing at the same time each day.
• Make sure that you write every day.
• Try not to edit as you go, or at least keep it to a minimum.
• Outline your novel so that you have a clear idea of how your plot and characters are going to develop before you start writing.
• Follow Sol Stein’s advice: “Write the sentence you want the world to remember you by.”
• Make time to write:
  • Write while you’re riding the subway to work.
  • Write in your car while your kid is in ballet lessons.
  • Don’t watch TV during the month of November and use that time to write (save your favorite TV shows and watch them in December).
  • Write while you’re on your lunch break.
  • Get up half an hour earlier and write.
  • Run as many errands as you can in October and use the time when you would be running errands in November to write.
• Keep your supplies collected: coffee mug, dictionary, thesaurus, notebook, pens, pencils, index cards, and so on.  You could easily lose precious time gathering your supplies each time you’re going to start writing.
• Explain to your friends and loved ones that you’re going to be less accessible than usual for the month of November and ask for their support.
• Stop writing while you still have something to say so that you can pick up on that train of thought the next day.

Books that Offer Templates for Your Novel

The following books have gotten very good reviews on Amazon and offer templates so you can create your novel by connecting the dots:

• You Can Write A Novel Kit
• Book in a Month: The Fool-Proof System for Writing a Novel in 30 Days
• Write a Novel in 30 Days
• Story Structure Architect: A Writer’s Guide to Building Dramatic Situations and Compelling Characters
• The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing

Related Posts:

• 54 Tips for Writers, From Writers
• Need Fresh Ideas? Go Streetcombing
• Mind Maps: Everything You Need to Know
• 5 Imaginative Ways to Generate Ideas

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