Preptober Character Planning

Ah, NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. It started in 1999 as “a daunting but straightforward challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days” according to the official website. Now, it’s a global movement where people decide to challenge themselves to see if they can start really writing that book they’ve always meant to write. Some big novels have started out from this challenge: Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, Alexis Daria’s You Had Me at Hola, Marissa Meyer’s Cinder, Darynda Jones’ First Grave on the Right among others.

Whether you officially participate through the website or challenge yourself without the added pressure of going “official”, enough people do it that “preptober” is now a popular hashtag on social media, offering you ideas to prepare before disappearing into your writing cave for November.

If you’re prepping to write something, what should you be thinking about? If you write non-fiction, like I do, you’ve already been immersed in your subject for an indeterminate length of time, doing research. You have pages and pages of notes, piles of books, and lists of books you wish you could access (but they are only, possibly, available through the internet for massive sums of money you aren’t willing to spend). If you’re like me you could keep going down rabbit holes of research- personally, I love research!- but you eventually have to recognize that it is time to stop the research and start your own writing. For me, this involves organizing my notes, spreading them all over the kitchen table (and possibly the floor) in chronological order, and then trying to turn them into something that people besides me will find interesting.

If you write any kind of fiction, you may have been living with characters, or even part of a plot, in your head for a while. Great! Now’s the time to get a few of your ideas written down before you start writing. Even if you’re more of a pantser than a plotter, you might find it helpful to keep track of your general ideas- before they inevitably disappear right when you need them!

Here’s just a few suggestions for you as you start prepping for your next writing project:

Characters: You probably don’t know all of your characters when you start prepping for your book. But the ones you do know (your main characters, some secondary characters) should all have a few things going on to make them more believable and three-dimensional:

• Goals/Aspirations: Your characters should know what they want in life, either long-term, short-term, or both. We all want some things in life, and your characters should to.

  • Flaws: Nobody’s perfect, so why should your characters be that way? We all have annoying habits, things we wish we could change, things other people don’t like about us. And if your character is perfect, I assume it’s only on the outside to hide some massive secret to be revealed in a later chapter.Insecurities: The other side of the flaw. We all feel insecure about things, no matter what we post on social media. No matter what your character tells others, they have doubts about things. They question things. If they don’t, I have to assume that overconfidence will be a problem for them somewhere along the way.

  • Uniqueness: Especially for your main character/s this is a big deal. What makes them unique in their time and place? What makes them special to you as a writer, and therefore hopefully to the reader? Let their personality: their likes and dislikes, their emotions and emotional IQ (if they have one), their physicality, all have a moment to shine. You love them, make us love them!