Writing a Novel in a Month

Each year, The Office of Letters and Light sponsors an Internet-based challenge called National Novel
Writing Month (or “NaNoWriMo” for short). If you’ve ever thought about writing a novel, or if you’ve
tried to do it before and failed, I’d encourage you to check out their site and participate in the next
NaNoWriMo challenge. In this post, I am going to share with you the tips and tricks that helped me to
complete the NaNoWriMo challenge successfully, and what I’ve learned in doing so.

Speed is of the Essence

To complete the NaNoWriMo challenge, you absolutely MUST resist the urge to go back and edit
anything you’ve written before. Any time you spend rewriting your work is time you’re taking away
from the goal of cranking out additional words. Remember, once the challenge is over, you have all the
time in the world to go back and make your words better. But if you don’t have them written there is
nothing to make better.

So, how do you resist the urge to go back and rewrite? These are the tools and techniques that worked
for me, and may help you:

 Before you start, brainstorm. Get to know your characters, the locations they’ll be in, and have
a basic idea for how they’ll get from start to finish. Tools like Dramatica, Power Structure,
StoryCraft, StoryWeaver, and others can help with this. (Remember, these are just tools. Use
them to enhance your writing process – not tell you what to write and how to write it. It’s your
novel, after all.)
 Create a “revision log” that stores all the changes you want to go back and make later. Once
you make a note in the log, keep writing as though the revision has already been made.
 Use “placeholder text” for any person, place, or object names you haven’t figured out yet.
Later, you can “find and replace” that placeholder text with the name you decide on. If you feel
like it’s essential that you have something named before you move on, remember that there are
a lot of “name generators” on the web that can help you.
 Plot out your novel in a “modular” way to make it easy to restructure and reorganize later.
Write in “scenes” rather than chapters, where a “scene” is defined as a specific group of
characters in a specific place, doing a specific thing. If the location, group, or activity changes,
it’s a new scene.
 Use a novel-writing tool like Scrivener, yWriter, NewNovelist, Storybook, or any of dozens of
other tools designed for the purpose. I found that with Scrivener I could store my revision log in
the same project file as my novel, so I could easily add to it as I went.
 Realize that you’re only writing your first draft. Like any first draft, it’s probably going to stink.
That’s OK. You’re the only one who has to read it right now. And no one will ever read it if you
don’t get it written.

I’m going to expand on the above points a bit, to help you understand what I mean. Feel free to skip the
rest of this article or scan down to the points that interest you.
 Brainstorming

When I started writing my NaNoWriMo 2009 novel, I had only the vaguest idea how the story would go.
My writing was sort of a “fictional stream of consciousness” from the starting point. As plot ideas came
to me, I incorporated them. When I decided they were clichés, I abandoned them. The finished piece
was, well, crap. But, I did meet my goal of 50,000 words of fiction in a month.

For 2010, I was determined to do better. I found a copy of Dramatica Pro for same on eBay, and
managed to snag it for $35. It’s normally around a $200 program, so this was a major steal. I spent as
much spare time as I could stand with the software through September and October, telling it about the
characters I envisioned, the story I was hoping to tell, etc. When I finally hit the end of its brainstorming
process at the end of October, I had around 12,000 words of background material on the characters,
their relationships, the story lines, etc.

I’m not suggesting that you need to run out and spend money on writing software. Here are some less
expensive solutions if you don’t have the money (or desire) to invest in a software product:

 “How to Write a Damn Good Novel” by James N. Frey was one of the first books I read on the
subject, and is still one of my favorites. You may find a copy in your local library, a used
bookstore, or a friend’s bookshelf.
 “How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II” by James N. Frey expands on the first book and offers
additional material.
 “Fiction Writer’s Workshop” by Josip Novakovich contains a number of exercises to help you
find and expand on ideas.
 “Beginnings, Middles & Ends” by Nancy Kress provides some good advice.
 Although it’s not specifically about novel writing, J. Michael Straczynski’s “The Complete Book of
Scriptwriting” includes a wealth of good writing tips.
 Discuss your story idea with friends, especially those who are avid readers. If they tell you your
story idea reminds them of something they’ve already read, think about how you can twist the
idea so that it no longer resembles the story they read.
 Visit your local library and talk to the librarians. Some libraries offer writing workshops and
programs that might help you.
 Use the web! Here are a few links I’ve found interesting (there are more in the “Writing
Resources” area of this site):
o [io9.com] “The 5 laws of making a story complicated without creating an ungodly mess”
by Charlie Jane Anders
o [suite101.com] “How to Create a Plot for a Novel” by Suzanne Pitner
o [creative-writing-now.com] “Tips for Writing a Novel: So You’ve Got an Idea -- What
Now?” by William Victor
o [musik-therapie.at] “Learn the Elements of a Novel”

I’m sure you can find many more. Consider the above just a starting point.
 Creating and Using a Revision Log

If you’ve read many books or articles on novel writing, you’ve probably seen some version of the advice
“Write your way through to the end without stopping.” This is good advice in general, but it’s absolutely
critical in a deadline situation like NaNoWriMo. Unfortunately, as you start writing your book, you will
invariably think of things that should be different in the parts you’ve already written. Maybe your main
character should be female instead of male, maybe the setting should a space station rather than a train
station, or maybe your heroine should have two brothers instead of a sister. The temptation is to go
back and rewrite those earlier parts to make those sweeping changes. If you keep a revision log, you
can discipline yourself to let go of that need to change things.

Imagine that you’ve been writing a story about a man who travels to Europe and meets the love of his
life there. About ten chapters in, you realize that there are some great things you could do with this
story if only your main character was a woman. What do you do? Open up your revision log. Leave
yourself a note like “Fred should really be a woman. In chapters 1-10, rewrite Fred to Jane and set up
the fact that Jane was robbed at gunpoint in the airport before coming to Europe.”

Now, close the revision log and write as though you’ve already made those changes. From the next
word you write until the end of the book, start writing “Jane” where you were writing “Fred” and refer
to the robbery as though you had written it in from the beginning.

When you finish the first draft, open up your revision log and go back to make the changes needed to
properly tell your story. Rather than chewing up your deadline time going back and rewriting words
(which won’t add to your word count or get you any closer to the end of your tale), just keep writing and
trust yourself to go back to make the necessary changes once your first draft is written.

Yes, not making the revisions as you go means that there can be huge inconsistencies in your novel at
the end of the first draft. But that’s the point. It’s a first draft. No one has to read it but you, and you
can always make the changes later before you show it to anyone. (And you can still call it a first draft if
you want to, if that makes you feel better.)

Using Placeholder Text

Something I struggled with in both of my NaNoWriMo novels was naming the characters and places in
the story. No matter what name I came up with, I just didn’t like it. Even going through the lengthy
plotting process in Dramatica, I just couldn’t seem to think of good names for my characters and
locations. Finally, I told myself “We’ll plug those in later” and moved on.

Anywhere I needed to refer to a character I hadn’t named, I used placeholder text like “[Village]” for the
name of the main character’s home town, which I had pictured as a small village. When I later settled
on the name “Estervale”, I had the word processor replace “[Village]” with “Estervale” throughout the
document. The resulting text makes it look like I had that name in mind from the beginning.

The key to using Placeholder Text is to make sure that you mark it in a way that uses spelling or
punctuation that you wouldn’t normally use in the story. For my example above, it is possible I might
have used the word “village” in the story to refer generically to a village. By surrounding the
placeholder with brackets (“[]”) I could ensure that my find-and-replace method replaced only the
placeholder text and not every occurrence of the word “village” in my story. If you planned to use
brackets in your story, use some other punctuation mark instead. Or, if you want to leave your options
completely open, make your placeholder text unique – like “InsertVillageName” or some other string
you know you won’t use in the story.

And be sure to list these placeholders in your Revision Log to remind you what they are and that you
need to go back to fix them later.

“Modular Plotting”

In one of the fiction writing seminars I have attended, the presenter defined the word “scene” as he saw
it. The definition condensed to “A group of one or more characters, in a specific location, doing a
specific thing, over a specific period of time.” By his definition, if you had three characters in their living
room, trimming a Christmas tree, and one of them left the room, you had a new scene. If the three
characters stay in the room, but finish trimming the tree and start making cookies, that’s a new scene.
At the time, I thought this was splitting hairs, and a lot of extra work.

As it turns out, it’s really rather logical, fairly easy to do, and has one very useful benefit. Your entire
story becomes “modular”. Imagine you aren’t using the concept of scenes as I’ve described here.
Instead, you’ve written a chapter of your book where three characters trim a Christmas tree, bake
cookies, and go caroling.

Farther along in your writing, you realize that the cookie baking activities should really take place much
earlier in the story, perhaps two or three chapters earlier. If you’ve written the story chapter-by-
chapter, you’ll have to read through the chapter until you get to the cookie baking part, cut it out of the
story, clean up the text before and after it, paste it into the earlier chapter, then adjust the text before
and after it. It’s not big deal, but it could have gone much easier if you’d written the story in a modular
fashion.

In the “modular” version of the above story, you have separate “scenes” for the tree trimming, cookie
baking, and caroling activities. Each scene could be stored in a separate file, or a separate element in
your preferred writing tool. When you realize that you want the cookie scene to appear sooner in the
story, all you have to do is move that file earlier into the book. You might need to adjust the start and
end of the file to blend into the new location, but you probably won’t have to change anything in the
scenes before and after it. The scenes are “modular” in nature and can be shifted about as needed.

The Scrivener software lends itself very well to this modular approach. So would the open source
Storybook software. All of these allow you to have a “master document” with “sub-documents” that
you can move about as needed.

This approach could also be used with the traditional “index card” method where each card represents a
specific scene. The writer can shuffle the cards into any order to tell the story in the desired way.
 Novel Writing Tools

Because I’m still a fledgling, unpublished, newbie author, I realize that there is a lot I don’t know about
how to write a good story. For me, using tools like Dramatica helps me to think my story through before
I sit down to write it. But just as important as plotting out the story is the tool you use to help you enter
and organize your words.

For NaNoWriMo 2009, I used Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org and they were fine. I got the job
done, and hit my 50,000 words without a problem. After beating the challenge that year, I received a
discount coupon for the Scrivener software for the Macintosh. I ran through the tutorials provided with
it and realized it was a good fit for the way I wrote. I bought a copy. Then, as ridiculous as it might
seem, I bought a MacBook so that I could have the software with me when I traveled. Up that point, I
hadn’t owned or used a Mac for about 10 years.

Just prior to starting NaNoWriMo 2010, I found out that they are working on a Windows compatible
version of Scrivener. Since my primary desktop computer is a Windows 7 machine, this was good news.
I downloaded and used the beta to write my 2010 story, and I’ve been very happy with the software.

I created separate “Texts” (think of them as text files) for each scene in my story. Into each of these text
files, I pasted the text from my Dramatica brainstorming about what I wanted to accomplish in that
scene. When November 1 rolled around and NaNoWriMo began, I opened up each text file and started
writing the scene I had described in the notes. When I was finished, I deleted the notes.

By organizing each text file around a specific scene, I was able to move events in the story to earlier or
later parts of the book by simply clicking and dragging them in the Scrivener window. This made it much
easier for me to restructure parts of the narrative on the fly without actually having to do any revision.

When I have the story in Scrivener the way I want it, I can have the software “Compile” all those text
files in order into a finished manuscript file.

I was also able to create a “Research” folder that contained information about the characters, locations,
and story points I wanted to make. I also included a Revision Log among those documents, which I
updated as I continued to write. (Items in the research folder are not included in the draft that Scrivener
compiles for you.)

Below is a screenshot of Scrivener in action, with a portion of my NaNoWriMo 2010 book open in it.
In the left-hand pane of this window, you can see that I’ve got a separate text document for each scene
in the novel. The center pane is the word processor built into Scrivener, in which you can see the text
for the scene “Kevin is attacked”. In the upper-right pane, I have the “index card” telling me the name
of the scene and a brief description of what happens in it. Below that, I’ve labeled this document as a
“Scene” and indicated that it is in “First Draft” status. Additional notes can be entered into the
“Document Notes” section if I need more than the Index card holds.

By clicking and dragging any of the text files in the left-hand pane, I can move the corresponding scene
earlier or later in my story line. There is also an “index card” view that allows me to reorganize the story
using a virtual version of paper index cards.
Since this isn’t a review of the software, I’m not going to go into great detail about it here. Suffice it to
say that I found Scrivener very helpful and intuitive for my particular writing style. It may or may not be
helpful for yours.

Other similar tools you might want to consider include Spacejock Software’s free yWriter 5 software,
which includes features for organizing scenes, project notes, characters, locations, and items – as well as
writing your story.
The open source “Storybook” software also provides tools for organizing your story components as well
as drafting the story itself. As you can see below, I began writing my notes for NaNoWriMo 2010 in
Storybook before switching over to Scrivener. I was already using the “scene” idea. Each of the thin
boxes you see in the left-hand pane represents a modular scene. Storybook allows you to drag those
around as need between the chapters (the larger gray boxes).
If you’d like to try fiction writing software and don’t have money to spend, Storybook is a nice option
since it’s free of charge (though the free version does contain a few “nag” messages about donating to
the project).

From now until the release of the finished version, the public beta for Scrivener for Windows is free.
(The Mac version can be downloaded as a free trial.)

yWriter 5 is a free product as well, and is worth taking a look at.

There are many other text editors, word processors, and novel writing products on the market you can
consider as well. Some of these are listed on my site’s Resources page.

Conclusion

Getting a novel written in 30 days is not an impossible challenge. In each of the last two years, I’ve
managed to win the NaNoWriMo challenge of creating 50,000 words of original fiction in a month. The
keys for me have been to plot out the idea in advance, use a modular approach to constructing the
story, use a revision log to keep myself from wasting time revising as I go, and having novel writing
software to help me keep things organized. Hopefully, some of these tools and ideas will help you in
your own writing.