The Author Wheel Podcast
The Author Wheel Podcast
Prepping for NaNoWriMo: Chapter Planning
Ever felt overwhelmed at the thought of writing a 50,000-word novel in a month?
We're here to help!
In our second "betweeniesode," award-winning fantasy adventure author Megan Haskell and USA Today bestselling mystery thriller author Greta Boris, give you new tips to prep for the marathon of National Novel Writing Month, aka "NaNoWriMo."
In this episode, we're going to help you set a foundation for your novel to streamline your writing process. How? By planning your chapters in advance and creating a story bible to house your research, world building, character development, and more.
Does this mean you have to be an outliner?
No! Megan's not. But building a file structure in Scrivener or whatever program you like to use—even writing down your ideas on notecards—and inputting as many details you can in advance will still help you avoid decision fatigue during the challenge. Listen in for all the details.
Let's get you ready to "Win" NaNo!
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Hi everyone and welcome to the author wheel betweeny sode number two, where we're sharing our best quick tips for nano-riMo. I'm Megan Haskell, award winning fantasy adventure author.
Speaker 2:And I'm Greta Boris, usa Today bestselling mystery thriller author. Together we are the author wheel. I'm going to jump into the first tip, and tip number one is plan your chapters. So, whether you are a planner or a plotter or a discovery writer, when you're going into something like a nano-riMo, where you really have to write quickly, you need to have some idea of what you have to write, almost like story starters. So what I suggest? We go over this in more detail in our quick guide planning a novel. You can check that out on the website if you're interested, but I'm going to do my best to give you a quick version of this now.
Speaker 2:So for nano-riMo, you're supposed to write 50,000 words. So imagine, if you will, that your book is a 50,000 word book and you know that when you write chapters, they're approximately 2000 words. This now means doing simple math, which is all I'm good for that you need to write 25 chapters. So what we suggest is that you go into whatever program you're going to be writing in, whether it's Scribner or Atticus or Word and set up those chapters in advance. So set up 25 documents or scenes or chapters, depending on which program you're using, and each one is going to represent a chapter and then give yourself, like I said before, those idea starters Put location, you know where is the scene going to take place, what characters are going to be in the scene, basically what you want to accomplish in that scene, what are the story plot points that have to get in there.
Speaker 2:Now, you may not have 25 ideas, but the more you can put down the better. And then when you actually get into nano-riMo and you're writing, if you finish a chapter on day three and you now know day four, I know exactly what I have to write and it's different than what I set up before. It's so easy to just put those new ideas down, copy and paste the ideas you have before if they still apply to somewhere later and move them around. But that way you sort of have a running, you know, like writing prompts, so that you're not getting up in the morning staring at a blank page before you've had a half a cup of coffee and going, oh, what am I supposed to write today? That is tip number one.
Speaker 1:And a variation on that, if you don't write in Scrivener, or even if you do, is to use physical paper, three by five note cards. Do a story, what do they call it? Storyboard, like they do for screenwriting, where you can actually take those ideas and just make them writing prompts. So maybe you don't exactly know. You know this scene where it's exactly going to fit in the novel. But if you have the idea and you write it down and you have as many ideas as you can come up with that that might fit into your story, then on any given day you can pick that item, that idea, and write it and put it in the story and that might prompt then the next chronological piece of the story, because some people don't write chronologically. I don't know how they do it, but some people don't.
Speaker 2:I know. I'm just going to say that. I know, I know James Scott Bell has a book called Writing your Novel From the Middle Out and I did try that once and oh my gosh. I had to completely rewrite that book. It was very difficult for me, but yeah, does work for some.
Speaker 1:And some people they just skip around and they write whatever scene is calling to them and then they manage to make it all work and fit together in the end. And if that works for you, great. So just have all your ideas written out on note cards and pick the one that you want to write that day, if that's the way your brain works. For the rest of us we write chronologically, so you know doing it in advance is also works.
Speaker 2:Yes, but having ideas for as many scenes as you can have set up in advance, with the documents set up in advance, or however you want to do it.
Speaker 1:Yep, exactly, all right. So tip number two, which is related, is to create your story Bible. So what is a story Bible? It's basically a collection of all your ideas or the things that you've actually written for your characters, your settings, locations, timeline. You want to collect all that information, all your research, put it all together in one place that's organized so that you have easy access to that information when you need it.
Speaker 1:So some of the things that we like to always include are you know your character names. For sure you can do. You know a full character sheet. You can customize it to whatever you like. So what they? You know their physical description, their personality, if they carry any special weapons or if they do anything different, what their job is, all of that kind of stuff about the character, any backstory that you might want to have in mind or share at some point. All of that goes into the character. You can do that for all the characters in your book Locations.
Speaker 1:If you have pictures, if they're real places and you can actually go look on. You know Google Earth or Google satellite or whatever it is. Do the street view I do that all the time. Take those pictures, move them into a document so that you have those for easy reference or maps, things like that. Timelines are fantastic as well, so you keep track of if there are any holidays during the period of your story or who's doing what, when and where, so that you can keep track of that. You don't have, you know, 50 hours in a single day or two hours in a week.
Speaker 1:You want to make sure that you're keeping the pacing of the actual chronological time accurate, and so there's some pretty cool tools you can use for creating your story Bible. You can make a simple one in Google Docs or Word. You can look at a paid software like Plotter, which has a phenomenal and very intense focus on story Bible creation. You can do your whole series Bible as well as the individual novel. It's very cool. So go look up Plotter if that appeals to have a software. And or you do it in Scrivener, which is actually what I've historically done, where you just keep everything into different folder systems in the Scrivener file for the book. So that's my tip on story Bible.
Speaker 2:And one more story Bible. You can actually even make a paper one. That's true to lose sleep notebook where you write all this stuff down. If you're a pencil person, yep, so that's another option.
Speaker 1:All right, so don't forget this is the last week to get 50% off the Finish your Novel Faster course. The coupon code expires on Halloween, so make sure you take advantage of that. Use the code nano RIMO N-A-N-O-W-R-I-M-O or just follow the link that's in the show notes. But that course is going to walk you through finding the time to write, getting your button, the chair and making it fun. So stay tuned. Next week we will be talking about how to get into the flow.
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