A Novel Plan!

By Laura Roberts

Got 31 days?

Use them to your advantage and start planning your next writing project!

Prepping to write a novel doesn’t have to be hard. Grab this new workbook for 31 days’ worth of exercises to help you get your ideas in order and your novel ready to rock!

Great for NaNoWriMo newbies and old hands alike. Perfect for any writer looking for additional structure and guidance when building their novels.

Whether you’re looking for gentle guidance or the firm push you need to finally get started, A Novel Plan! can help.

NOTE: This ebook also contains a link to a printable PDF workbook, which can be used to help plan your novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Buttontapper Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463624494

Laura Roberts

Laura Roberts can leg-press an average-sized sumo wrestler, has nearly been drowned off the coast of Hawaii, and tells lies for a living. She is the founding editor of Black Heart Magazine, the San Diego Chapter Leader for the Nonfiction Authors Association, and publishes whatever strikes her fancy at Buttontapper Press. She currently lives in an Apocalypse-proof bunker in sunny SoCal with her artist husband and their literary kitties, and can be found on Twitter @originaloflaura. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Laura has penned the alphabetical travel guides Montreal from A to Z and San Diego from A to Z, offbeat writing guides A Cheater’s Guide to NaNoWriMo and Confessions of a 3-Day Novelist, and the satirical adventure tale, Ninjas of the 512. She is also the editor of the collection Haiku for Lovers, and the forthcoming anthology Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned from Pop Songs (February 2016).

Book preview

Preptober (sometimes known as NaNoPrepMo) is the unofficial planning month before National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo, takes off in November. The entire month of October is devoted to brainstorming, plotting, character sketching, figuring out settings and scenes, and otherwise scribbling notes towards what will, ultimately, become your novel.

If you’ve never attempted NaNoWriMo before, you might not think you need a workbook like this. But if you’ve gone through too many NaNoWriMos in the past, only to end up with 50,000 garbled words that have never developed into a fully finished manuscript, this is just the workbook you need!

Planning, despite the NaNoWriMo credo of No plot? No problem! is actually a very desirable – and even pleasurable – part of the NaNoWriMo process. While some participants will always be Pantsers, writing their stories completely by the seat of their pants, and thoroughly enjoying ever twist, turn and tangent, some of us will always be Planners. Methodical, concentrated on results, eager to make sure our wildest flights of fancy still, somehow, fit into our nice, orderly plot.

Even if you’re not a strict Planner, and prefer a Plantser approach (a mix of Planner and Pantser), doing a bit of pre-NaNo planning never hurts. The exercises offered in this workbook are meant only as guidelines, and none of them are set in stone. Don’t like one of the suggested exercises? Feel free to skip it, or create your own!

Ultimately, your novel writing experience will be as unique as you are. We all take different approaches to writing our books, and none of those ways are wrong. Do what works for you, no matter what, and if this workbook works for you, great! If not, consider it an experiment that simply had a less than optimal outcome.

Whether you’ve plotted a million novels before or this is your very first attempt, I hope my workbook will help you work through whatever pre-writing issues you may have as you ponder the best place to begin. I’ve created a step-by-step, day-by-day workbook, complete with prepping exercises on character development, setting your scenes, building your settings, and plotting from start to finish. These are meant to be done one day at a time during the month of October, as part of your planning process for your NaNoWriMo novel, but you can also use them any time of the year as you work on other novel projects. In short, the goal is to dive deep into the planning process, in the attempt to make writing your novel this November a little more fun and a lot more coherent than 50,000 words slammed out at random.

So follow along with the exercises, one day at a time, and by October 31st you’ll have the beginnings of a great novel.

Ready to get started? Let’s go!

DAY 1: CHARACTER BASICS

Welcome to day one of novel planning! Today is all about brainstorming some straightforward character traits: the character basics. Focus first on your main character, and then complete additional profiles for your other major characters. Once you’ve completed your profiles, you can add them to your novel binder or bible – the place where you’ll keep all of your planning worksheets and reference material for your NaNo novel. This info comes in handy as a quick reference, particularly if you have a cast of thousands and keep forgetting whether your MC has green eyes or blue.

Here are the basics you should list for each of your characters:

QUICKIE CHARACTER PROFILE

Name