#nanoplanmo

Looked for some good prompt lists and couldn’t quite find any I wanted to use this moth so I made my own. If you want to use mine feel free to, and feel free to tag me if you do

(May edit/change if needed)

Set-Up

1. Who is the main character(s)? Why are they the main character? Who/what is the antagonist and why?

2. What is the general setting? What location, if any, does most of it take place in? Why is this the main location? 

3. What is 'life as normal' for your MC? What do they think or this? What is the inciting incident that changes this life for them?

Beginning

4. What is the main plot, or at least, the main plot as it begins? What is the goal and what is the initial route to achieving it? What will be the main plot, even if the MC doesn’t realize it yet?

5. What is your character’s personal stakes in the plot? What do they want, and is it different from the states goal? Is it what they actually want or actually need? How do these conflict with the antagonist's goals?

6. What does your MC or your audience learn about the world as the characters begin to explore it? What is new, and how does that change? What is this world based on/run on (magic, strict rules, tradition, etc) 

7. What is the first goal the MC has to achieve? How does it go, and what is its role in the major plot? Does it seem simple at first before the MC discovers it’s more complicated? Does this open the door to a new turn in the plot, or is it simply a step in a larger goal?

8. Does your MC have any major secrets or fears? What do they have to lose, what's at stake? How can this be taken advantage of by the antagonist?

9. As you structure the world around what needs to happen for the plot, are there any pieces that make up a lot of how the relevant world works? A particular technology, an important magic item/spell, a certain creature or plant? What are the rules for how this works, what can it do and why is it needed? How do people view it? Are there any aspects of this that people don’t realize or didn't think they could use them for?

10. Are there any side characters that play a role? What role do they play, how are they important, what are they like?

Middle & Development

11. How does the antagonist mess with the MC's plans? What complications happen? How do these lead into each other?

12. What is your character’s greatest strength, and their greatest flaw? How do these interact? How does their flaw make things harder for them? How does the antagonist take advantage of their flaws?

13. What is most interesting in your world? What do your characters love or hate in the world? Is there anything particularly interesting not for plot reasons but simply interesting? How can this come up? Does this say anything about the larger world or society?

14. Are there any plot ideas you have that you aren’t sure where they belong? Note what these are. What needs to happen before these can? What could these plot points lead to? 

15. What is your MC's background? What is in their past? Do they have a minority status in any way and does/how does this affect them? How does their past shape their present actions? 

16. How might readers connect with your story? What would you guess would keep them reading, assuming you write it well? What is most intriguing to you? Why do you feel the need to write this story?

17. Are there any major subplots going on? Why are they important? Do they add anything to/influence the main plot? How does the main plot influence the side plot?

Middle & Higher Stakes

18. What is most significantly in their way in achieving the main plot? Can they address this head on or do they have to seek alternate routes? What stops them from addressing it head on? Does the antagonist control all of these or are their complications outside the antagonist's control?

19. How does your MC progress the plot? How do they change the plot? How do they worsen things and how do they improve things? What are their major struggles? How does the antagonist progress the plot? How do they change it? 

20. What does your MC discover about the world as they go through their journey? How do these discoveries impact them?

21. What are the biggest turn(s) in the plot? What changed and why? Has their original goal changed, or has it just become more complicated? What other implications does this have?

22.

Is there anything that the MC refuses to change about themselves that is now getting in their way? Are they able to change, or does it backfire on them? Does the antagonist take advantage of it? Is there any way the antagonist changes?

23. How has the world’s culture, the society, the governing bodies— played a role? Are the characters acting within these or rebelling against them? Does anything need to change, or so these drive the plot itself?

24. What are you discovering as you plan? What are your own weaknesses, what do you need to develop more? Is there anything you’re blind to, anything you don’t think you’ll know yet? What are you still stuck on?

Climax & End

25. What goes wrong in their initial plan to achieve their goal? Why does it go wrong? What mistakes were made? What needs to change to achieve it? How does the antagonist get the upper hand?

26. How does your MC's growth set the stage for the climax? Would they have been able to do what they do at the beginning of the story? What has changed for them? 

27. What major parts of the world— a setting, an item, a societal concept— can be taken advantage of to set the stage for the final confrontation? How does it help them achieve their goal, and why wasn’t this used before? Alternatively, how does this cause them more problems, and how do they address it?

28. How do they finally achieve their goal? Why did it work now, and why couldn’t they have done this in the first place?

29. Who is the character now and how is it different? When the story is over, who are they, did it change, and can they return to their old life? 

30. How has the world/setting changed as a result of the plot? What's different about the world? Has it been impacted, or is everything mostly the same? Does this mean anything? 

31. Looking at everything you have in combination, what is your story about, fundamentally? How has your MC changed and what have they learned? How has your antagonist changed if they have (or things the antagonist controlled)? Are there any core themes that have come up?

With NaNoWriMo coming up, maybe you want to have a NaNoPlanMo first.

This post is for you if…

… you want to try outlining, but don’t know how to begin.

… you never finish a first draft because you don’t know how to proceed or how to write a long story.

… you tend to forget certain characters are present in a scene.

… you don’t want to write your scenes chronologically, without losing track of your story.

… or you often write yourself into dead ends or have to fix major plot holes or pacing problems after finishing your first (or second, or…) draft.

First of all, this is not a plea against pantsing. If you’re a happy pantser, pants away, my darling!

1. So, first, let’s decide what story to write

I’m a big fan of the notion “write what you love”. If you don’t love your story, why write it at all, right?

Make a list of the elements or tropes or character types you like. For example:

queer character cast

and there was only one bed

faulty magic with bad consequences

punny names for minor characters

Now, make a list of things you don’t like. This helps me to stay away from them, especially if something is prevalent in my genre. For example: dragons, romantic stalking, politics, epic battles, the logistics of travel.

2. Now, make up the general storyline.

Look at your love list and turn them into a story in a few sentences. Don’t write more than a page, you’re still kindling your outline.

For example: An Asian girl is sent away by her parents for something she did in the first chapter. She thinks it’s a punishment and she assumes she’ll never see her parents again. But who is this uncle Bonkel she’s being sent to, and why has she never heard of him? Turns out, uncle Bonkel is a wizard and she’s gonna be his apprentice. He’ll introduce her into the feisty, fickle world of magic. But he already has an apprentice, a hot bi girl with the most gorgeous Afro hair. And, uh oh… there only is one bed…

This is just a quick example, I’m sure you can come up with something better. (Although… Can someone write this for me? ^-^)

3. Turn this tiny idea into an outline

Write out the different elements on post-its, or in a grid, whatever method of visualisation suits you best. I used post-its at first, so that I could swap things around, and when I was happy, I transferred it into an online excel that I can check where-ever I’m writing.

In this case, the example story breaks down to these elements:

Something happens, in hindsight we’ll see that the girl has used magic but she doesn’t realize it just yet.

Her parents overreact, giving her the impression she did something bad, and send her away to uncle Bonkel.

Who tf is uncle Bonkel? she wonders, as she is packing her stuff, never to return home again.

The reader gets to know the girl better during the train trip to uncle Bonkel, because of course, she doesn’t get there easily. Things go wrong, of course, what would you have thought?

And more things go wrong, but she deals with it, and the way she deals with it shows us what kind of a person she is.

She arrives at uncle Bonkel’s house and he is… weird.

She gets a glimpse of the dark goddess, a first impression, but they aren’t introduced yet.

Uncle Bonkel sits her down for The Talk: Yes, magic is real, and apparently she did magic. Whaaaaat?

Then she gets to meet the dark goddess, who turns out to be uncle Bonkel’s other apprentice, but apparently she’s less keen on sharing, both Bonkel’s mentorship and her bed.

Wait, her bed? There’s only one bed…?

...

And so forth. You get the picture. You can write big or small events on your post-its, even great parts of dialogue or random lines you came up with.

My story is more complicated than this, so I ended up making a grid for each storyline and each character (group), so I can keep track of who needs to do what when.

If you’re finished making your outline, check if you didn’t…

... leave a character dangling

... raise questions you never answered

... or start a storyline that you haven’t finished

In this example, if the girl wonders in the beginning why she never heard of uncle Bonkel, have you given an good explanation for this at some point? And if she thinks she’s never coming home again, have you included a scene in which she goes back to her parents? And is it clear to the reader why the girl thought her parents were angry when they weren’t? Have you explained why her parents don’t just sit her down and tell her about magic themselves? Or why she didn’t know about magic before the thing happened?

4. If you like, you can take this outline further to get a grip on the story’s pacing.

You can decide which events are most important and put them on a narration timeline. Afterwards, you can place the minor events around them.

To continue with my example, I decide that the scene in which she arrives at uncle Bonkel’s house will be at 20% of my story, at 40% there’s a first major magical disaster, and the first time she kisses the dark goddess will be at 50%, but of course they pretend like nothing happened, so the first time they admit there is something happening between them is at 80%. In between these events, I will play with the growing love between the girls and show them learning the fickle art of magic.

An average novel of this genre is about 75,000 words long. (You can google the average lengths for each genre.) If a total of 75,000 words is my goal, it means I need about 15,000 words (20% of 75,000) before she arrives at uncle Bonkel’s, and the first magical mishap is after about 30,000 words (40% of 75,000), etc.

From this, you can deduct how long each (post-it) element needs to be, or if you need to add a filler element, or if you need to move a post-it to a different spot.

There’s no need for your scenes to be all of the same length, of course. In my example, the scene where she gets the first glimpse of the dark goddess is much shorter than the next scene, where uncle Bonkel sits her down for The Talk.

I would advise you not to flesh out your outline too much. You don’t want to take away the creativity from writing your first draft. I usually only use one-sentence descriptions for each scene, so that I can still surprise myself while writing. This way, you’ll also avoid not finishing your outline because you get too carried away and you want to start writing before you’ve finished your outline ^-^

***

Okay, that’s it! Go forth and write, my darlings!

(BTW: This post describes an outline which still gives you loads of leeway. If you want to try a more structured approach, maybe my post How I turned an idea into an outline is something for you. This method gets your pacing right from the start by showing you what kind of elements go where on the narration line. The rest is pretty similar.)

I hope this was helpful. Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions, and happy writing!

Follow me for more writing advice, or check out my other writing tips here. New topics to write advice about are also always welcome.

Tag list below the cut. If you want to be added or removed, just let me know.

Hahahaha...

“Novella”

Yes

It definitely isn’t turning into a long novel and / or series 👀

Well basically I was like “I should do NaNoWriMo this year, I need to write more” and started planning a kind of throwaway “just for fun” novella, fantasy because I’ve been in a LotR mood, and the more I planned it the more it actually started to be promising, and then I was like “well I can’t just bang this out all slapdash, it could be so much better,” so my NaNoWriMo turned into NaNoPlanMo and now it’s a whole Thing.

Getting some spreads ready for next month! I’ve never tried using a bullet journal before but novel prep/writing seemed as good a use as any!

Preptober has officially begun and I am READY! Today's goal was to write down my protagonists and info about them which I finished rather quickly!!! Day 1 is a success!!! Let's hope I can keep that up though;;;

[all images are not my own and can be found on my pinterest; the middle image is Chawntell Kulkarni]

Introducing Fidelle Floyd, the lead character of the novel. Smitten with mystery, Fidelle is a forensic science student keen on discovery and exploration. Though quite reserved, she is creative, adventurous, and a strong leader to the team.