J. R. FRONTERA, author

Rebel stories for rebel souls...

NaNoWriMo: The Secret to Success is to …

Winter is coming.

More specifically, November is coming. And with it, National Novel Writing Month.

If you are a writer or an author, you probably either love or hate this time of year, as your social media will suddenly alight with a frenzy of “NaNoWriMo preparation” posts. You’ll hate this if you think NaNoWriMo is just a bunch of rubbish (and you’d be wrong about that), and you’ll love it if you think NaNoWriMo is awesome (and you’d be right about that) and plan to take part this year yourself.

But maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t really prepare for NaNoWriMo. Maybe you’re the kind of person who thinks they’ll just wing it, and still manage to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

Well, I feel I should tell you something. There’s a reason October 1st brings about so many posts about preparing for NaNoWriMo … and that reason is because preparation is the key to success at NaNoWriMo. Even Writer’s Digest is on the wagon. I just received an email this morning announcing this video tutorial on pre-plotting!

Those of us who have participated in NaNo for a few years (and WON) now know this. Those new to the gig may not know this, but that’s why I’m here! A few years ago I wrote up a series of blog posts on NaNoWriMo preparation, and they’ve turned out to be quite popular in the fall, although they can, of course, be used for novel planning at any time of the year. They’ve become so popular that this year I decided to give them their very own pages, so that visitors didn’t have to dig through all of my blog history to find them.

If you are one such intrepid NaNoWriMo-er for 2015, you can find those posts, which I called a NaNoWriMo Boot Camp, along the top navigation bar, or simply click here.

BUT WAIT! There’s more!

If you read those posts and find them useful, or want a little more information, or maybe just one place in which to put all of your pre-plotting and planning brainstorming, I have decided to create a Pre-Plotting Your Novel Workbook, which I will be self-publishing hopefully before November hits and throws the world into chaos. Ideally, I’d like to have it out now, but since it just recently occurred to me that this might be a thing worth holding in my hands, it’s going to take a little time to put together and format, etc.

So bear with me!

If you would like a preview of how this came about and what it’s all about, I have posted the entirety of the book’s introduction below, for your reading pleasure. NOW is the time to be thinking about your NaNoWriMo project, people! You cannot plot and write at the same time! (No, not even you, pantsers … that’s why it’s called pantsing!)

There will be much more here on the blog on NaNo in the weeks to come, but for now I leave you with this. Good luck!

(an excerpt from my book The Pre-Plotting Your Novel Workbook: Boot Camp Basics for Writing a Novel in 30 Days! (for Plotters, Pantsers, and Everyone In-Between), coming later this month!)
THE BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THIS BOOK: HOW DID IT GET HERE, ANYWAY?
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away … oh no wait. That’s wrong.
A long time ago, back in 2012 … yes, that’s it! So, a long time ago, back in 2012, a friend and I decided we would begin meeting up once a week to work on our novels together. We had both aspired to be writers for quite some time before that, and I had been writing furiously on both original projects and fanfiction for nearly ten years at that point. Writing furiously, and going exactly nowhere.
I hadn’t finished an original work of fiction since 1998.
Then, that same friend talked me into trying National Novel Writing Month in November of 2012. If you’re not sure what NaNoWriMo is, that’s where you try to write 50,000 words (think Fahrenheit 451) in 30 days, which equals out to 1,667 words per day for the entire month of November.
Needless to say, having hardly managed 5,000 words on my novel in 5 years, I was terrified of NaNoWriMo.
But, I somehow (miraculously) stumbled my way through my very first National Novel Writing Month in 2012 … and actually managed to write 50,000 words in 30 days! The knowledge that I could, in fact, write the equivalent of a short novel in one month was life-changing for me. I immediately fell in love with the idea of writing a novel in a month –or at least, the idea of writing half of a novel, or a third of a novel, in a month (my novels tend to be around 150,000 words total). How else was a person supposed to ever finish a book, right?
Although I was ultimately successful that November in 2012, it wasn’t easy. And I became frustrated about halfway through the month when I hit a very strong, very thick brick wall in my story. I had absolutely not a clue where my story was going, and that made it nearly impossible to meet my daily word count. How can you write words when you don’t know what the words are supposed to be? (Pantsers, you be quiet! We’ll get to you in a minute!)
After sweating through this kind of panic, I bought a few guide books on how to write a book in 30 days. I thought this might help me write faster, with less panic, during my next NaNoWriMo. I practiced during the two 2013 Camp NaNoWriMo months, held in the spring and summer, and what I found was that the guidebooks were chock-full of fantastic advice, but they weren’t really for writing your book in a month. They were really for pre-planning your novel beforehand.
All of these books advocated planning in order to write faster.
By the time November of 2013 approached, I had so much information spread out over so many different books that I decided to create a series of blog posts for myself (and anyone else who was interested) to organize and consolidate the most basic helpful advice I’d discovered, tested, and found to be useful so far.
I wanted simple, quick, easy-to-understand summaries. I wanted concrete exercises that would give me results which were easy to reference while speed-writing during November. I constructed the blog posts in the way I thought would accomplish all of these things.
I followed the instructions I laid out for myself in these blog posts, and NaNoWriMo 2013 proved to be far more efficient and far less stressful than 2012.
Since then, I have heard tale from other writers, too, that the steps outlined in these posts proved greatly helpful throughout their NaNoWriMo adventures –and beyond. That being the case, I thought I might take the idea of the Boot Camp Basics for Writing a Book in a Month one step further and provide fellow writers like you with their very own pre-plotting workbook.
I hope you find it as handy as I have, and good luck!

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