The Extreme Bare Bones of Your Novel

This is going to be the easiest part of planning out your novel. It'll take you all of twenty minutes, mostly because of the synopsis, but you'll be fine. I will say that this is originally from the website WriYe and our NaNoWriMo planning sessions called OctoOctober. However, as much as this is basic, I never planned out the real basics of the novel until this.



What you're going to do is write down (or type or whatever you do for plotting) the following:

Title:
Genre:
(Subgenre, if needed):
Projected WC:
Challenge: NaNoWriMo
Synopsis:

That's it. So, here's mine for the mystery novel, because it doesn't have a title yet, and you can use this even if you don't have a title. Or a synopsis.

Title: Mystery Novel (very creative, I know)
Genre: Mystery
Subgenre: Detective
Projected WC: 80K - 50K during November, 30K in December
Challenge: NaNoWriMo
Synopsis: When the mediator between two warring drug organizations turns up dead, Detective Sydney Parker is called in to sort out what's really happening. Despite was looks like a simple gang related shooting, what's coming and what the person's death means is a lot more sinister.

So, not my best work when coming up with a synopsis, but it helps to give me something when I'm working on my plot, characters, and deciding where to set the novel. It's most likely going to be a major city, unless I decide that a smaller city might work better, but it helps to get your thoughts in order. Now, let's say you have a title but no synopsis. Let's say you have something like this.

Title: The Fallen Heart
Genre: Fantasy
Subgenre: TBD
Projected WC: 50,000
Challenge: NaNoWriMo
Synopsis: TBD

So, here, you know that you're going to be writing fantasy and you have a title. I consider it harder to come up with a title vs a synopsis. So, with this, you have the words fallen and heart. Maybe you put in that your subgenre is romance and it's someone who has a dark hard that is working to redeem themselves. Or put in fairytale for your subgenre and you could write Snow White from the evil queen's point of view. Your genre and your subgenre, if you want one, is going to help with your brainstorming sessions. After you figure that out, you can go into setting, then characters, then plot. After you have all of that figured out, you can come back and write your synopsis. It does not have to be a perfect one, but one that helps you, in short hand, remember what your novel is about.

So there are the extremely bare bones of your novel. From that, you can grow your novel and figure out where you're going. Now, we covered world building last month, along with setting in the real world if you're going to use that, so those are all under the [2016] September tags and the world building tags. Next week, we'll go over characters and trying to see what best works for everyone.

Quick note: If you're on the East Coast, especially down in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, please stay safe. Please heed what your public officials are telling you as this storm is deadly. My thoughts and well wishes are with you.

Have a good and safe weekend, everyone.