NaNoWriMo is sneaking up on you. It’s lurking in the shadows, inching ever closer, hoping to suck you into its voracious maw on November first. And on that day it would be most unfortunate to be unprepared. Conceiving a story and rambling on to meet the word count will likely make for a bloody mess thirty days later.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Now is the time to prepare for NaNaWriMo. How? By putting on your thinking cap in general and using Hiveword’s suite of tools for writers in particular. The Hiveword platform is comprised of:
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The Hiveword novel organizer
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A set of prompts (integrated with the novel organizer) to improve your story via writing coach James Scott Bell’s Knockout Novel program
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A writer-specific search engine for great articles on writing curated by Elizabeth Spann Craig
With the Hiveword background out of the way, here are some things you can do in advance to make November easier on yourself.
What’s Your Story?
Rummage through your story ideas and see what strikes you. Give some thought to a new story if you want. Once you know the story you want to go with start taking notes or maybe do some outlining (no matter how incomplete).
In the Hiveword novel organizer you can create a new story to capture all of your story ideas. There’s no limit to the number of stories you can have and you can refer to them now or years from now for inspiration. You also might consider applying writing coach James Scott Bell’s wisdom to your story through his interactive prompts with Knockout Novel. You can do the prompts separately for all of your stories to wring out issues with them and to hone them into the best stories they can be.
Create Some Characters
Brainstorming about your story will obviously cause several characters to come to mind. Bring those characters to life by jotting down some notes about their appearance, background, wants, etc. This can be as detailed (or not) as you want it to be. There are tons of character sheets on the web that you can use to flesh out your characters.
You can track all of your characters in Hiveword with its built-in character sheets. There’s even a built-in name generator to spark some ideas. The Knockout Novel part of Hiveword will really focus you on your lead and opposition characters to ensure that they really shine.
Scenes!
Start thinking about the scenes for your novel and capturing the essence of each in a few lines. You can do this in a Word document, spreadsheet, or even something as low tech as index cards. Regardless, your goal is to string together most of the scenes in your story so that you have an idea of how things are supposed to go. When you sit down to write there will be no time wasted while you dream up what to write next so you’ll work at maximum efficiency.
Tracking scenes is Hiveword’s bread and butter. You can make scenes, shuffle them around, and even attach characters, settings, and plotlines to each so that you know where everything goes. Powerful filtering allows you to see only the scenes that you want to focus on,such as all scenes with your lead character, for example.
You should now have a great head start on your story so that November is filled with nothing but writing. You’ll still have to think and create, of course — heck, that’s the fun part! — but you won’t be at a loss for what to write next since you’ve already taken the time to lay out your course. You’ll be super-efficient!
Hiveword is free so why not give it a try and see if it helps you make this November your best NaNoWriMo ever. The Knockout Novel prompts work within Hiveword and can be applied to as many stories as you like. Until November 1st, Knockout Novel is only $39 which is a savings of $10!
Good luck in November!