You don't need National Novel Writing Month

But here's a four week plan for pantsers

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Super weird time for NaNoWriMo… Super weird. If you’re not in the loop, in short: the organization behind National Novel Writing Month a while ago was embroiled in a scandal which involved one of their employees grooming underage people on one of NaNoWriMo’s message boards. Senior leadership of the organization didn’t handle this well. Then, most recently, they suddenly came in hot out of no where with a statement proclaiming that people who say that writers shouldn’t use AI to write are ableist and classist. As it turns out, one of their new sponsors is an AI company, and possibly they were prodded to make that statement.

As you may know, I do live for gossip, particularly literary gossip, but let’s put that drama aside.

Before all that, I was neither here nor there about NaNoWriMo. I don’t see the point in hurrying to write a novel, because forcing yourself to write very fast might lead to bad writing, but perhaps it’s nice to have the camaraderie* or to set aside the time to concentrate on your project. (*that said, there is a certain brand of person who calls themselves a writer but spends more time talking about writing—particularly how hard it is—than actually writing..) That in mind, let’s set aside word count, and instead think about going through a plan that will set you up to write a novel more quickly than if you didn’t.

I’ve come up with a 4 week plan for people who might want to make serious advancements on a novel in the span of a month or so—how long it takes you to write the actual text will depend on how fast you write when you know what is happening and who is driving those happenings.

As you may also know (see additional reading below), I’m not a huge fan of pantsing. There’s some sort of sensitivity about this, like it’s not okay to criticize other people’s process. I guess I don’t care—I don’t see it differently than my personal trainer pointing out that the way I’m holding my body isn’t most advantageous for squatting. Writing without a plan strikes me as as strange as building a house with no blueprints. Would you buy a house where the builder said, “I just sort of went wherever the spirit took me.” I also don’t know a single plotter who wishes they were pantser, but the converse isn’t true. Whatever—fight me.

But hey, that’s just how I am! I’m a pantser! So you say. But like.. I wasn’t a guitar player, then I became a guitar player. I learned. I changed. I developed the necessarily skills for guitar playing. Playing a F barre chord seemed impossible—I tried, it was too hard, so I stopped playing for a couple years because playing barre chords is a basic guitar skill if you want to get past basic stuff. Sort of like how I hear many pantsers saying, “I tried writing an outline.” Then when I picked up the guitar again, I started looking things up on YouTube and Reddit. Turns out everyone finds playing that F impossible at first. But there are various tricks to get yourself up to the point where you can play one. I had to develop strength in my finger and hand muscles. I had to figure out exactly how to place my hand on the neck. And I found out that the action on my acoustic was abnormally high (meaning you have to press harder to make a chord). So I had to 1) develop a muscle 2) learn technique 3) learn about my tools. Everything that can be learned can be broken down into digestable pieces.

Here’s my several-week plan:

Week One: Identity something that actually excites you.

Think about a premise for a book. By premise, I don’t mean plot. I mean something that hooks you. What’s something you’ve been turning over and over in your head lately? This could be an image. It could be a character. It could be a high-concept setup. It could be something from a book or movie that you were quite taken with. Here are a few actual examples of the above. The idea for Never Saw Me Coming came from an image that popped into my head: if you’ve read the book, it’s the part where someone hits someone with a geode and someone else unexpectedly sees this. I didn’t know who these people were. Just what happened, but not why. For a character, Vince Gilligan has talked about how the impetus for Breaking Bad started from his desire to show a character “Go from Mr. Chips to Scarface.” (Chips is a reference to a fictional schoolteacher who is not a bad person). High-concept: I just got back from a short vacation to West Virginia, specifically Lansing, West Virginia. There is a massive gorge there with a river running through it, and back in the day the entire area was revolutionized when the government built the New River Gorge Bridge. The picture below doesn’t quite capture exactly how far up this bridge is.

I was not a huge fan of driving over it! It is very beautiful though, and every year the town has Bridge Day to celebrate it. I could not help think: I wonder how many people jump off it. (I guess I’m a mystery/ horror writer for a reason..) I got an image in my head of the bridge day celebration, and someone looking over to see a bunch of young men climbing over the railing to their deaths for no apparent reason. I keep thinking of that image, and maybe will turn to it one day—that could easily be a book. Or maybe there’s a character who really caught your eye and you’d like to write about someone like them. When I saw Queen’s Gambit I thought the character of Benny Watts was so interesting and weird (he’s the US national chess champ who’s sort of dressed like a cowboy and is interpersonally weird yet respected). I remember him more than the main character.

So here’s what you do that first week. Develop that idea. Sit down with pen and paper or your computer and ask yourself a lot of questions. Feel free to answer questions, but also free to change your answers to those questions later. Let’s use my bridge example. Well, is this story literally about the New River Gorge Bridge? No—I wouldn’t want to set the book in WV because I’d rather make up my own town. My town, my rules, I suppose. So why is it just men/boys jumping off the bridge? Not sure why that popped into my head exactly, but I’m guessing it’s because suicide is hitting men worse than women. Do the boys know each other? I think they went to college together. Actually wait, maybe they don’t, and that’s what makes it even stranger— why would boys who don’t even associate with each other do this at the same time? And why are they jumping off the bridge? This one I have been mulling over for a while. I don’t know. What would make someone do that? Actually, several people do that. I made a list: something is compelling them. Supernatural? I don’t think I want it to be supernatural. They feel guilty about something? That might work, but I do know that I don’t want any sexual violence in this story. Is it a pact? Maybe—but the pact would have to be really powerful for them to actually follow through on it. But I know one thing that’s weird—none of them were depressed. Why would non-depressed people do this? What could be so important as to compel them??

Just work on the premise for a week making a giant network of questions and answers—probably more of the former than the latter. Asking yourself questions and trying to answer them might touch upon different plot elements (when did the boys decide to do this? Just before they jumped, or years ago?) or character elements (who are these boys? I have a sense that they are all generally good people, and that one of them has a surviving younger brother who is always getting into trouble.) Think about things peripheral to that premise that might be related to theme, tone, or atmosphere. Let’s say you want to do Scarface to Mr. Chips. Why does he want to become a better, more normal person? Is this a heartwarming story, or a cynical one? A funny one in a lighthearted way or in a dark and violent way? etc. Is the story also about a place or a particular political or social issue? What are similar stories out there? If your story is about a curmudgeon taking care of a little kid (the lone wolf and cub trope), what are things you like about that trope that work for you? What are things you hate about it? This is the week for brainstorming, for coming up with hare-brained ideas and not judging yourself for them. Nothing is written in stone and anything is possible.

Week Two: Develop characters who are interesting and three dimensional.

Work on your characters. You can look through my archive for character development posts, but I’ll say it again: knowing who your characters are before you completely hammer out your plot helps you to avoid “Why did that happen? Because plot” situations. That is to say, your characters should drive your plot, rather than the other way around. If a week seems like an excessive amount of time to develop characters, it’s not. (I did this for a month before I wrote my second book.) It’s the equivalent of overstudying for a test. You’ll do better on the test. Figure out who the major major characters are and who the major minor characters on. The major ones should get the full treatment, the major minor ones should get just enough to be three dimensional.

Weeks Three, Four, and beyond: Identify major beats.

Start with the broadest potential arc, if you have a sense. Is the story about people falling in love? A redemption? A murder mystery that gets solved? You might not have a sense of the full arc right now— that’s fine.

Start to think about beats. Beats are the key moments in a story. “The love interests meet each other” can be a beat. “There is a car chase” can be a beat. When it comes to actually writing, a beat can end up taking one chapter, or maybe even more than one chapter, that doesn’t matter—it’s just a major plot point that drives the story forward. You might know a beat—that Chloe hits someone with a geode—but not why. But write down the beats you do know. Then think, how do we get to the point with the geode? What happened before? (It turns out, she planned to catch that person alone.) What has to happen before that particular beat? (She established a relationship with the person who walked in on her hitting someone with a geode). Filling in those questions will help you find other beats. (Chloe meets the the person who walked in on her at an earlier time point). What has to happen after that beat? (ie, what are the consequences?) If you have some beats in mind already, you may or may not know the order they happen in. If you don’t know the order, I recommending using a manipulatable like index cards or post-its and moving them around to see what works better.

Everyone is different, but for me, I don’t start writing until I have figured out maybe 80 percent of the broad beats. So I would know for a murder investigation that they spend day 1 investigating clue 1, day 2 on clue 2, but I might not know all the ins and outs of exactly all the things they do on day 1. The closer I come to writing that actual point, the more I have that figured out. If you’ve written up a plan, it makes it less likely that you will be completely stuck on something.

Maybe after you’ve got the plot 80% figured out, try writing a query or pitch letter.

Additional reading:

This one’s not paywalled

These two are

Photo by Yoann Siloine on Unsplash

Is anyone undergoing a major writing project in November? (I mean, I am, but it’s a revision)