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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone and welcome to the author wheel
betweeny sode number two, wherewe're sharing our best quick
tips for nano-riMo.
I'm Megan Haskell, awardwinning fantasy adventure author
.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
And I'm Greta Boris, usa Today bestselling mystery
thriller author.
Together we are the authorwheel.
I'm going to jump into thefirst tip, and tip number one is
plan your chapters.
So, whether you are a planneror a plotter or a discovery
writer, when you're going intosomething like a nano-riMo,

(00:36):
where you really have to writequickly, 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 detailin our quick guide planning a
novel.
You can check that out on thewebsite if you're interested,
but I'm going to do my best togive you a quick version of this

(00:59):
now.
So for nano-riMo, you'resupposed to write 50,000 words.
So imagine, if you will, thatyour book is a 50,000 word book
and you know that when you writechapters, they're approximately
2000 words.
This now means doing simplemath, which is all I'm good for

(01:20):
that you need to write 25chapters.
So what we suggest is that yougo into whatever program you're
going to be writing in, whetherit's Scribner or Atticus or Word
and set up those chapters inadvance.
So set up 25 documents orscenes or chapters, depending on

(01:43):
which program you're using, andeach one is going to represent
a chapter and then give yourself, like I said before, those idea
starters Put location, you knowwhere is the scene going to
take place, what characters aregoing to be in the scene,
basically what you want toaccomplish in that scene, what
are the story plot points thathave to get in there.

(02:06):
Now, you may not have 25 ideas,but the more you can put down
the better.
And then when you actually getinto nano-riMo and you're
writing, if you finish a chapteron day three and you now know
day four, I know exactly what Ihave to write and it's different
than what I set up before.
It's so easy to just put thosenew ideas down, copy and paste

(02:28):
the ideas you have before ifthey still apply to somewhere
later and move them around.
But that way you sort of have arunning, you know, like writing
prompts, so that you're notgetting up in the morning
staring at a blank page beforeyou've had a half a cup of
coffee and going, oh, what am Isupposed to write today?
That is tip number one.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
And a variation on that, if you don't write in
Scrivener, or even if you do, isto use physical paper, three by
five note cards.
Do a story, what do they callit?
Storyboard, like they do forscreenwriting, where you can
actually take those ideas andjust make them writing prompts.
So maybe you don't exactly know.

(03:13):
You know this scene where it'sexactly going to fit in the
novel.
But if you have the idea andyou write it down and you have
as many ideas as you can come upwith that that might fit into
your story, then on any givenday you can pick that item, that
idea, and write it and put itin the story and that might
prompt then the nextchronological piece of the story

(03:33):
, because some people don'twrite chronologically.
I don't know how they do it,but some people don't.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
I know.
I'm just going to say that.
I know, I know James Scott Bellhas a book called Writing your
Novel From the Middle Out and Idid try that once and oh my gosh
.
I had to completely rewritethat book.
It was very difficult for me,but yeah, does work for some.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
And some people they just skip around and they write
whatever scene is calling tothem and then they manage to
make it all work and fittogether in the end.
And if that works for you,great.
So just have all your ideaswritten out on note cards and
pick the one that you want towrite that day, if that's the
way your brain works.
For the rest of us we writechronologically, so you know
doing it in advance is alsoworks.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Yes, but having ideas for as many scenes as you can
have set up in advance, with thedocuments set up in advance, or
however you want to do it.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yep, exactly, all right.
So tip number two, which isrelated, is to create your story
Bible.
So what is a story Bible?
It's basically a collection ofall your ideas or the things
that you've actually written foryour characters, your settings,
locations, timeline.

(04:44):
You want to collect all thatinformation, all your research,
put it all together in one placethat's organized so that you
have easy access to thatinformation when you need it.
So some of the things that welike to always include are you
know your character names.
For sure you can do.
You know a full character sheet.

(05:06):
You can customize it towhatever you like.
So what they?
You know their physicaldescription, their personality,
if they carry any specialweapons or if they do anything
different, what their job is,all of that kind of stuff about
the character, any backstorythat you might want to have in
mind or share at some point.
All of that goes into thecharacter.
You can do that for all thecharacters in your book

(05:29):
Locations.
If you have pictures, if they'rereal places and you can
actually go look on.
You know Google Earth or Googlesatellite or whatever it is.
Do the street view I do thatall the time.
Take those pictures, move theminto a document so that you have
those for easy reference ormaps, things like that.
Timelines are fantastic as well, so you keep track of if there

(05:50):
are any holidays during theperiod of your story or who's
doing what, when and where, sothat you can keep track of that.
You don't have, you know, 50hours in a single day or two
hours in a week.
You want to make sure thatyou're keeping the pacing of the
actual chronological timeaccurate, and so there's some

(06:10):
pretty cool tools you can usefor creating your story Bible.
You can make a simple one inGoogle Docs or Word.
You can look at a paid softwarelike Plotter, which has a
phenomenal and very intensefocus on story Bible creation.
You can do your whole seriesBible as well as the individual

(06:33):
novel.
It's very cool.
So go look up Plotter if thatappeals to have a software.
And or you do it in Scrivener,which is actually what I've
historically done, where youjust keep everything into
different folder systems in theScrivener file for the book.
So that's my tip on story Bible.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
And one more story Bible.
You can actually even make apaper one.
That's true to lose sleepnotebook where you write all
this stuff down.
If you're a pencil person, yep,so that's another option.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
All right, so don't forget this is the last week to
get 50% off the Finish yourNovel Faster course.
The coupon code expires onHalloween, so make sure you take
advantage of that.
Use the code nano RIMON-A-N-O-W-R-I-M-O or just follow

(07:28):
the link that's in the shownotes.
But that course is going towalk you through finding the
time to write, getting yourbutton, the chair and making it
fun.
So stay tuned.
Next week we will be talkingabout how to get into the flow.