A Preptober plan: get your novel ready for November in three weeks

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

If you want to draft a novel in November, the three weeks before it matter more than you think. Not because you need a perfect outline, but because day nine is much easier when you already know who your people are, roughly where the story is going, and how many words you owe tonight. Here is a plan with one job per week, and checklists you can copy straight into your notes.

November is coming whether you are ready or not. If you are planning to join Novel November, the free challenge ProWritingAid has run since the NaNoWriMo nonprofit closed, its prep workshops started on October 1. If you are doing the month on your own, the calendar is the same. Either way, today is about three weeks out, which is exactly enough time for this plan.

The plan assumes you have a life. Each week is one job, and each job fits into a few evenings of thirty to sixty minutes. If you miss a week, skip to the next one; the checklists at the end of each section are the part that matters.

First, decide how much you like to plan

Writers sort themselves, loosely, into plotters (who want the route mapped before they leave) and pantsers (who find the story by writing it). Most people are somewhere between. It is worth knowing which way you lean before you start, because it changes what week two looks like. If you are not sure, pantser vs plotter walks through it. Either way, weeks one and three are the same.

Week one: the premise and the people

Start with a premise you can say in one breath. A useful shape: someone wants something, but something is in the way, and if they fail, this is what they lose. “A widowed baker wants to keep her late husband's shop open, but the landlord has sold the building to a chain, and if she fails she loses the last place that still feels like him.” It does not have to be good. It has to be clear enough that you can tell when a scene belongs in this book.

Then make a rough guess at the ending. Not the last line, just the last situation: does she keep the shop, lose it, or find out she never wanted it? You are allowed to change your mind in November. Knowing where you are aiming is what stops the middle from drifting.

Now the cast. Keep it small: your main character, whoever or whatever opposes them, and two or three people who matter most. For each one, write down what they want, what they are afraid of, and one thing they are hiding. Add a line about how they talk. That is a character you can write on a tired Thursday. A forty-question questionnaire is fine if you enjoy it, but it is not required; how to make a character profile that actually helps you write covers the questions that earn their place.

Week one checklist

• One-sentence premise: who, wants what, what is in the way, what they lose.
• A rough guess at the ending situation.
• A working title (a placeholder is fine).
• Main character: want, fear, secret, how they talk.
• The opposition: who or what, and why they want the opposite.
• Two or three key supporting characters, with the same four notes.
• Where and when the story takes place, in one line.

Week two: an outline, or a loose plan, and a scene list

This is the week that looks different depending on how you write.

If you plot, build the spine. Name the opening situation, the event that kicks the story off, the point where your character commits and cannot go back, a midpoint that changes what the story is about, the moment everything falls apart, the climax, and the ending. Seven lines. Then fill in between them. How to outline a novel compares six methods if you want a named structure to hang it on.

If you pants, write a loose plan instead: the opening scene, the ending you are aiming at, and three signposts, things that must happen somewhere in the middle. Stop there. That gives you something to steer toward on day fifteen without telling you everything that happens.

Everyone: make a scene list. This is the single most useful thing you can bring into November. At 1,500 to 2,000 words a scene, a 50,000-word draft is roughly 25 to 35 scenes. Write one line for each scene you can already see: who is in it, what they want, what goes wrong. Plotters will have most of the list. Pantsers might have ten lines and a lot of blank space, which is fine. The list is not a contract. It is a menu, so that on any given night you can pick a scene you feel like writing instead of staring at the next blank page. How to write a scene that works covers the goal, conflict, and turn that make a line on a list into something you can draft.

Cards help here. A scene on its own card can be moved, split, or cut in a second, which is exactly what you want in October, when the plan is still soft. Index cards on a table work. So does any board that lets you drag them around.

Week two checklist

• Plotters: the seven-line spine, then the scenes between.
• Pantsers: opening scene, ending you are aiming at, three signposts.
• A scene list, one line each: who, what they want, what goes wrong.
• Mark the three scenes you are most excited to write. Those are your rescue scenes for a bad night.
• Note any subplot you want to keep alive, and roughly where it surfaces. (How to track subplots if you have more than two.)

Week three: the schedule, the target, and only the world you need

Do the math once. Fifty thousand words over thirty days is 1,667 a day. November 2026 starts on a Sunday and has five of them, so taking Sundays off leaves 25 writing days and a target of 2,000. Taking weekends off leaves 21 days and about 2,381. Decide your days off now, not on a tired Saturday, and decide your total too: 50,000 is the tradition, not a rule, and a number you will actually hit beats one you abandon. The November novel challenge planner does this for any target and dates and prints a 30-day tracker.

Find the time on the calendar. Look at November as it really is: the holidays, the work trip, the week a relative visits. Write down when each day's words will happen. Morning before work, lunch break, after the kids are down. A target without a time slot is a wish. Word count goals has more on setting one you will keep, and how to stick to a daily word count covers the days it gets hard.

Setting and world: only what the story needs. It is very easy to spend all of October on worldbuilding, because it feels like writing and none of it is hard. Resist. Make notes on the places your scene list actually visits: what each one looks, sounds, and smells like, and any rule of your world that a scene depends on. If you are writing fantasy or science fiction, add the one or two rules that would break the plot if you forgot them. Everything else can be invented in the draft, in brackets, and checked in December.

Set up the boring things. Pick where the draft will live, and set up a backup now, before there is anything to lose. (Never lose your novel draft again is the ten-minute version.) Tell the people you live with what November looks like. If you are joining Novel November, register and look at the sprint schedule, because writing alongside other people is half the point.

Week three checklist

• Total target for the month, and your days off, decided.
• Daily word count worked out (the planner does it for you).
• A time slot for each writing day, written on the calendar.
• Notes on the places your scenes visit, and any world rule the plot depends on.
• Where the draft lives, and a backup that works.
• The first three scenes you will write, chosen.
• The first three mornings (or evenings) cleared.

If you only have one week

Do this in order and stop when you run out of time: the one-sentence premise, the main character's want and fear, a guess at the ending, ten lines of scene list, and your daily target with the time slot you will write it in. That is about two evenings of work, and it is enough to start.

What to leave out of October

Drafting chapter one (save the words for November, when they count). A perfect title. A map of the whole continent. Research rabbit holes that do not touch a scene on your list. Rereading old attempts at this book to see what went wrong. All of these feel productive. None of them make November 1 easier.

Where Inkling fits

Inkling is one place to do all of this, if you want one place. It is not affiliated with ProWritingAid or Novel November, and you can use both. Each story gets its own storyboard, with Scene, Character, Place, Idea, and Note cards you can drag and connect, so the scene list from week two lives right next to the draft. The character builder has fields for what a character wants, why, what they actually need, their fear, their wound, and the lie they believe. And if you set your target from the challenge planner, it becomes a goal on your desk that waits until November 1, then counts the words you add to your stories and shows the words a day you need to finish. Novel November's dashboard takes a word count logged by hand, so you can copy your number across.

You get 14 days to experience the full writing desk, build worlds, and be creative. No card to start. After that it is $9 a month or $72 a year. The trial is shorter than November, so if you want to write the whole month in Inkling, plan for that; if you stop, nothing is deleted and you can export every story to Google Docs. And whatever you use, Inkling or paper or a document you already love, the plan above works the same.