Is It Too Early to Prepare for NaNoWriMo?

Rule number 1 of NaNo: There are no rules

What is NaNo?

National Novel Writing Month was founded in 1999 by some college kids who thought it would be fun to try to write 50,000 words of a novel in the single month of November. This works out to about 1,667 words written per day. It’s a fairly reasonable goal in terms of word count, but in terms of making a story work, it’s definitely daunting.

That’s part of why NaNo grew from a one-month event to a four-month event: NaNo in November, the Now What months in January and February, and Preptober in October.

Preptober

Writing a brand-new novel from scratch, by the seat of your pants, starting with word one on day one is hard enough work, and for some writers, myself included, it’s more or less impossible to go in with just an idea and an optimistically naïve belief an idea alone will propel me to the finish line.

Enter Preptober. A whole lot of planners/plantsters (that is, those who plan novels before writing them, or do some combination of planning and flying by the seat of their pants) believe that if we’re going to take November to write, we should be spending October planning.

The popular editing platform Reedsy has a pre-writing checklist for October here, and Eva Deverell has a Preptober schedule here, with one prompt per day.

These tools can be a great framework for anyone who wants to be more prepared for NaNo but isn’t sure where to start. I personally don’t use them, because I know what does work for me, and one month of planning isn’t it.

Why I’m Planning Now

Confession time: Part of why I’m starting my NaNo prep on September 1 instead of October 1 is because I’m going to be on vacation for like three weeks in October. As much as I love writing, I don’t want to be spending my free time working through an outline for my story. I want to be splashing in the pool with my kids, or exploring places I’ve never been to before.

But that aside, I almost always start planning NaNo by mid-September anyway. Why’s that? A few reasons.

First, I know myself. I need at least six weeks before I feel confident that my idea has legs enough to write. I need that time to let my ideas marinate, to see what sticks, to see what I keep coming back to. I prefer to work through John Truby’s Anatomy of Story, which involves a lot of thinking about the interrelationships of characters, how the setting ties in to the story, etc. It takes time to get through, more time than I usually have in October.

Second, my goal isn’t to write 50,000 words in a month.

I might. I might not. But my goal entering NaNo is never to “win” for the sake of winning. My goal is to write the foundation for a novel I can finish. A novel I will — one day, after a lot of editing — think is good, and hopefully publishable. If “following the rules” won’t get me there, then I break the rules.

NaNo as a Tool

In the end, NaNo is just a thing made up by a bunch of dudes twenty-some years ago. It’s a tool, a framework, and a time to develop community. There’s lots of ways to be a NaNo rebel, and planning too early is one of mine.

I love the community, the Discord/Twitter sprints, the idea of everyone writing together. After all, I hate drafting. I’d much rather edit. But I do like community and camaraderie, so participating in NaNo is pretty much the only way I’ll draft at all.

If your goal is to write a novel that, post-revision, will be a good book, then take what works for you and leave what doesn’t. Now, if you don’t mind me, I’m off to take some planning notes for my eighth novel.

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