Countdown to NaNoWriMo!

We’ve reached October, and we can all count the days until November and National Novel Writing Month roll around! (I searched for an appropriately excited-scared gif for this blog post, but I just couldn’t find one thrilled enough.)

So! How goes your planning for NaNoWriMo? Hopefully you’ve decided on a premise from however many ideas you might have, and worked your way up to a blocked out concept with some character ideas, setting plans, and thoughts about what twists and turns may be of use. Have you named your main characters? Did you pick the right setting to highlight your story to its fullest potential? What are your primary plot points?

MICE Quotient

Last month I went through some big picture planning, picking genre and point of view, idea and plotting method. This month I’m going to focus on adding more detail to your Characters, Setting, and Plot. But first I thought I should point out why I’m doing them in that order.

What are the different kinds of stories? Forget about publishing genres for a moment; there isn’t one kind of characterization for academic-literary stories, another kind for science fiction, and still others for westerns, mysteries, thrillers, or historicals. Instead let’s look at four basic factors present in every story, with varying degrees of emphasis. Balancing these factors determines what sort of characterization a story must have, should have, or can have.

The four factors are milieu, idea, character, and event.

Orson Scott Card, Characters and Viewpoint

Orson Scott Card saw the primary conflict in all stories could be broken down into four categories, and then from those categories, you could build different kinds of stories. He called it the MICE Quotient, which stands for Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event. Different genres focus on different factors. It’s impossible to break things down further and provide a one-size-fits-all method for creating a story.

Even so, all stories kick off somewhere. Whether your character introduction gets interrupted by your inciting incident or you’re still revealing parts of your world, there’s always a catalyst moment that starts the plot moving. Perhaps that’s why many writers outline their plots in such detail, I’d have to ask someone who is better at planning than I. The big plot points are often known to you by this point, it’s the little moments that aren’t. What drives those? Your characters.

In one of my books in progress, the main character’s flaw is pride. She has a prodigious gift that makes her capable of a lot more than she could ever have dreamed, and it makes her reckless until she’s shown that there are some problems she can’t fix. In order to show her that, I had to have something bad come about due to her recklessness. That had to fit into my plot somewhere. It would never have happened if I didn’t know my character, and once I’d added it, that scene ended up driving several others I hadn’t planned for, either. I posit that no story is going to impress readers without the characters, and that means character development arcs that are natural and make the readers care. Sometimes this happens after the first draft, but you can get a lot more accomplished in a single draft if you’ve planned the characters out before you work on the smaller pieces of your plot (or, for pantsers, before you start writing, so you know what needs to get in there somewhere).

Why setting before plot, then? Because you need to know your setting well enough to have natural solutions when you come up with a plot twist that takes your characters somewhere you didn’t plan for. Where does your main character go when they’re scared? Do they have a quiet place they go to think? If they’re traveling, what are they bringing with them? In the absence of their home turf, what do they seek out if they need to stop along the way? Your characters and your setting interact a good deal, and you can get a ways ahead if you do the planning beforehand. (Not to mention fantasy novels focus a good deal on their settings and you need to know the coolest parts of the setting before you can show them off.) At that point you can start on your plot, include the character development points, your major points, and see what’s missing.

Miscellaneous Resources I Haven’t Shared Yet

• Writer’s Digest. As much as I don’t like to boost other places, this one’s worth it. There’s a lot here that you have to wade through, but they do have a search function.
• Brandon Sanderson’s YouTube class on Writing Science Fiction. I’ve heard good things, though I haven’t watched it myself yet.
• Lee Lofland’s blog about writing crime fiction. He was a detective at one point and now runs the Writer’s Police Academy once a year as well as consulting with authors. He also has a book about Police Procedure for writers through Writer’s Digest that I’m told is really good. The Howdunit series also has books about Forensics and Poisons by other authors.
• Stanislavsky’s Insights: Writing techniques from the acting world.
• Boston Public Library’s Resources Guide to Writing Fiction. Managed by one of the Boston region’s Municipal Liaisons.
• The same librarian who put the resources above together also put together a peer-to-peer Learn To Write Fiction course, which while it may be hard to do solo, has a number of exercises and resource links.

• Names and Naming: Behind the Name and their Surnames subdomain, Fantasy Name Generators, and Name Census (formerly names.mongabay.com) for actual census rankings of names in the US.
• Fantasy Languages: Vulgar (meaning colloquial, not rude), a phoneme-based Fantasy Language Generator.

• Derek Murphy’s Plot Dot, for visually-minded writers (and anyone who needs a new perspective on their plot). Mentioned this last week, but the site and the free book are significantly different from the NaNo Prep 101 worksheet.
• K.M. Weiland’s 7 Steps to Creating a Flexible Outline for Any Story. I have found this extremely useful, especially as someone who isn’t good at planning. I base most of my prep efforts around this process.
• Dan Harmon’s Story Circle. A simplified Hero’s Journey for any writer.

• Meditation apps: Simply Being, Relax and Rest, Pzizz, Calm, Insight Timer. I highly recommend taking breaks during the day with a simple meditation like Simply Being that just makes you stop and try to decompress before you get back to work.
• Pomodoro Technique: a productivity tool to enable better focus and make yourself take breaks. I use tomato-timer.com a lot, at least until I’ve upset it by letting my computer idle during pomodoros (it can get a bit troublesome when it’s confused, but it’s the best I’ve found).
• Bullet Journaling: a way to keep track of everything you do and need to do.
• Self Journal by BestSelf: This has really changed my productivity and I recommend it highly.

Next Up: Characters!