November is coming. I know, I know – October has barely arrived, the leaves are still green (almost), and the last thing you want to hear is that National Novel Writing Month is lurking on the horizon like a friendly but relentless giant. But here’s the thing: the writers who do well in NaNoWriMo aren’t the ones who make it up as they go along. They’re the ones who prepare. And the most important thing you can prepare before the first of November is your idea.
And yes, I do know that NaNoWriMo doesn’t exist under that name any longer, but numerous sites throughout the writing community have their own version. I’m taking part this year and posting my writing to the prowritingaid site at – https://prowritingaid.com/. And this looks interesting too – https://nano2.org/
Not just any idea. An idea that excites you. An idea that you can still be passionate about on day twenty-two, when your word count is flagging, your wrist hurts, and the middle of your novel is a swamp that seems to swallow every sentence you write. Because let me be honest with you: NaNoWriMo is hard. Writing 50,000 words in thirty days is hard. The discipline is hard, the consistency is hard, and the doubt – the horrible, whispering doubt that tells you this story is boring and everyone who reads it will skim it and you should have been a banker – the doubt is very, very hard. The only thing that gets you through it is an idea that you love so much you can’t bear not to write it.
So this first post in our NaNoWriMo Prep series is about one thing and one thing only: finding the idea that excites you. Not the idea that seems most publishable, or most impressive at dinner parties, or most likely to impress a writing teacher. The idea that makes your fingers itch. The idea that you think about in the shower. The idea that, when you imagine someone else writing it, fills you with a strange mixture of jealousy and protectiveness. That’s the idea you want.
A little history
The idea of waiting for the right idea is as old as storytelling itself, but the modern obsession with “the idea” – with standing at the edge of a blank page and wondering what to write – has its roots in a very particular place: the twentieth century writing workshop.
Before the 1930s or so, most novelists didn’t think of themselves as people who found ideas. They were people who wrote. Charles Dickens didn’t wait for inspiration to strike; he wrote serialised novels to a deadline, knowing the next instalment had to be with his publisher by Thursday whether the muse had visited or not. Jane Austen wrote in the drawing room, surrounded by family, weaving stories out of the social textures she observed around her. There was no concept of “finding an idea” because ideas were everywhere – in the newspaper, in the gossip, in the strange man who lived at the end of the street. The world was an idea factory, and the writer’s job was simply to be the person who paid attention.
But the rise of the creative writing programme, and the enormous cultural influence of writing schools in the mid-twentieth century, shifted the emphasis. Suddenly, the idea became a thing – a precious, almost magical object that writers were expected to find, polish, and present. Courses were built around the “generation of ideas.” Workshops spent entire sessions talking about where ideas come from. And a generation of writers internalised a quiet, crippling belief: that there are good ideas and bad ideas, and that the difference matters enormously.
The irony is that the writers who actually produced the great novels of the twentieth century would have found this belief slightly baffling. Ask Ursula K. Le Guin where A Wizard of Earthsea came from, and she’d tell you a story about sitting in a grey apartment and wanting to write something – anything – while the wet day pressed against the window. Ask Neil Gaiman where American Gods came from, and he’ll point at a road trip through America and a low, persistent hum of an idea that wouldn’t leave him alone. Ask anyone who’s ever written a novel on deadline, and they’ll tell you the same thing: the idea isn’t a gift from the gods. It’s something you cultivate, like a garden, by paying attention and showing up.
And that’s the first lesson of this post: you don’t need to find a brilliant idea. You need to find an idea you can’t stop thinking about. Those are two very different things. The brilliant idea is the one that impresses other people. The idea you can’t stop thinking about is the one that will keep you writing at 11pm on a Tuesday when you’d rather be asleep. And for NaNoWriMo, there’s only one of those that matters.
The problem with trying to be original
Let me guess what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: but I don’t have an idea at all. Everyone else seems to have ideas. My friends have ideas. The writers on Twitter have ideas. But whenever I sit down and try to think of something to write, my mind goes blank, or everything I can think of feels derivative, or I have a vague sense that maybe I could write something about a woman returning home after twenty years, but who cares about that?
Here’s the thing I wish someone had told me years ago: originality is overrated. Not because there’s anything wrong with being original – of course there isn’t – but because the very act of seeking originality strangles the idea that’s already inside you. When you sit down and think, “I need to come up with something nobody has ever written before,” your brain, which is a pattern-matching machine, immediately starts presenting you with everything it knows has already been written. Every idea you generate feels derivative because, on some level, it is. Every story has been told. There are no new stories under the sun. There are only new tellings of old stories.
And that’s fine. That’s more than fine – it’s the whole point. Romeo and Juliet is an old story. Hamlet is an old story. The story of a young person who leaves home, faces trials, and returns transformed is older than writing itself. Nobody is asking you to invent a story that has never been told. They’re asking you to tell a story that only you can tell, in the only way you can tell it, with the specific details, experiences, and obsessions that make your telling different from anyone else’s.
So stop trying to be original. Start trying to be interested. What do you find fascinating? What do you think about at three in the morning when you can’t sleep? What did you love reading when you were twelve? What makes you angry? What breaks your heart? What do you want to understand better? These are the seeds of your idea. Not the search for something nobody has ever written. The attention to what already moves you.
Finding your idea: five places to look
Bill Bryson once wrote that the secret to travel writing is never to run out of things to notice. The secret to finding an idea is similar: never run out of things to wonder about. Here are five places to look for the idea that will carry you through November.
Look at what you’re already obsessed with
You have obsessions. Everyone does. You have books you’ve reread until the spines cracked. You have topics that make you accidentally lecture your friends at parties. You have historical periods you’d recognise at a glance, or ecosystems you studied out of pure interest, or jobs you did for ten years that most people know nothing about. Whatever it is, it’s a goldmine.
The best fiction is almost always written by someone who knows their subject deeply and loves it visibly. Michael Crichton knew medicine and science. Ursula K. Le Guin knew anthropology and Taoism. Terry Pratchett knew history, folklore, and the ridiculousness of bureaucracy. They wrote what they were obsessed with, and their obsession leaked into every page – not through info-dumping, but through confidence. They never had to research whether their detail was right, because they already knew. They could spend their energy on the story.
What are you obsessed with? Write it down. All of it. The list doesn’t have to be coherent. It might be “The English Civil War, salmon farming, my grandmother’s recipes, horror films from the 1970s, the way light falls through venetian blinds.” Now ask yourself: is there a story in there? There always is. Somewhere in that list is the seed of a novel that only you could write. Not because the subject is unique, but because your relationship with it is.
Take something you love and ask what you’d do differently
Every writer starts as a reader who thought, “Hmm, I’d have done that differently.” You loved a book and you hated the ending. You read a series and you thought the magic system was underdeveloped. You watched a film and you thought the romance was rushed, or the villain was wasted, or the worldbuilding was crying out for more.
That instinct – the “I’d have done that differently” instinct – is one of the most reliable idea generators there is. It’s how fan fiction becomes original fiction. It’s how every literary movement started. The Romantics wrote their own version of the Gothic. The modernists reacted against the Victorians. Every writer is, in some sense, in conversation with the writers they love, pushing back against them, answering them, finishing their sentences.
So pick a book, film, or series you love. Now imagine the sequel nobody wrote, or the prequel, or the story told from a different character’s point of view, or the version where the ending goes another way. Don’t worry about whether it’s “allowed.” You’re not plagiarising; you’re exercising a muscle. And that muscle – the muscle that takes a loved thing and imagines it differently – is the same muscle you’ll use to write your own novel.
Mine your own history
Here’s a frightening thought: you already have a novel’s worth of material inside you, and it’s all true. Your life is not boring. It might feel boring to you because you lived it, but that’s like a fish saying the ocean is boring. The people you’ve met, the places you’ve been, the relationships that shaped you, the jobs you’ve done, the things you’ve had to overcome, the things you’ve failed at, the things you’ve never told anyone – every one of these is material.
The best novels often feel like memoir wearing a mask. They’re not literally true, but they’re emotionally true; they’re built from the texture of real experience. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said that no matter how fantastic his writing seemed, it was always rooted in real things he’d witnessed growing up in Colombia. Toni Morrison wrote from history, but the history she wrote felt alive because she understood it emotionally, the way you understand your own family’s history.
You don’t have to write a fictionalised autobiography. But you can absolutely use the raw material of your life – the time you spent in a hospital, the year you lived abroad, the friendship that fell apart, the thing your father said that you’ve never forgotten – and build a story around it. The characters can be invented. The plot can diverge wildly. But the emotional truth, the texture, the detail that only you know – that’s what makes it sing.
Let the news, history, and odd small stories be your starting point
Every newspaper has a half-column story that could be a novel. Every history book has a footnote that contains an entire life. Every court case, every obituary, every local news story about a disputed hedge contains the seed of human drama.
You don’t need to look far. A story about a woman who discovered at her father’s funeral that he’d had a whole family in another city. A historical account of a man who faked his own death in 1740 and was found out thirty years later. A news piece about a fishing village that lost its entire younger generation to a factory job in the city. Any of these could be the spine of a novel. The writer’s job is not to invent the idea from nothing. It’s to look at the world the way a fortune teller looks at tea leaves – seeing the story hidden in the ordinary arrangement of things.
Some of the greatest novels were sparked by newspaper headlines. Dickens read about workhouses. Nabokov read about an abduction that became Lolita. Sarah Walters was inspired by Victorian court records and police files. The world is full of stories waiting for someone to notice them. Be the person who notices.
Combine two unrelated interests
One more place to look: the point where two of your interests collide. This is the most powerful idea generator of all, because it produces ideas that feel genuinely fresh – not because they’re new, but because the combination is yours.
Beekeeping and the law. Chess and the French Revolution. Competitive baking and organised crime. Cloud formations and a failing marriage. Take any two things that fascinate you and push them together until they spark. The collision is where novelty hides. Science fiction was born when people pushed together technology and adventure. Magical realism was born when writers pushed together the everyday and the supernatural. Your idea might be sitting in the space between two things you love that you never thought to combine.
So here’s your homework: write down ten things you love. Not ten things you think make you sound interesting. Ten things you genuinely love. Then draw lines between pairs and ask: what story lives in the intersection? You’ll be surprised how often one of them sparks.
Some guidelines:
Once you’ve found an idea – or a few ideas – here are the guidelines that will help you choose the right one for NaNoWriMo.
First, choose the idea that you can’t stop thinking about. Ideas fade. The one that seemed thrilling on Tuesday can feel like a chore by Friday. So find the idea that keeps coming back to you. The one you think about in the shower. The one that makes you want to describe it to someone. That need to talk about it is a good sign. It means the idea is generating heat, and heat is what carries you through thirty days of writing.
Second, choose an idea that you can actually finish. This means being realistic about scale. A sprawling epic spanning six generations and four continents is a magnificent idea, but it is not a 50,000-word idea. A focused story about one character’s journey – or one family’s crisis, or one relationship, or one season in one village – is a much better fit. NaNoWriMo rewards stories with a clear centre, not stories with a wide horizon. You can always worldbuild beyond the story later. The story itself needs to be contained.
Third, choose an idea that feels like it has a middle. This is the killer. Lots of ideas have great beginnings. Many have endings. But an idea with a middle – a sense of what will happen in that long, swampy stretch between chapters six and thirty – is a rare and precious thing. When you think about your idea, can you feel the middle of it? Can you imagine the complications, the escalating stakes, the obstacles? If you can’t, that doesn’t mean the idea is bad. It means it’s not ready. Spend more time with it before November.
Fourth, choose the idea you’re most afraid of. There’s a strange phenomenon in writing: the ideas that scare you – the ones that feel too personal, too ambitious, too revealing – are usually the ones you should write. Not because you’re obligated to write something scary, but because fear is often a sign of truth. You’re afraid because the idea is close to something real. And the story that’s close to something real will keep you going when the novelty has worn off. It has roots you won’t be able to ignore.
Fifth, don’t ask the internet. This is a genuine piece of advice. When you’ve found a candidate idea, the temptation is to ask – in a forum, a group chat, a writing community – “is this idea good?” Don’t. You’ll get thirty different opinions, most of them based on vibes rather than anything useful, and you’ll walk away more confused than before. The only opinion that matters right now is yours. You’re the one who has to write it. You’re the one who has to live with it for thirty days. Choose the idea that speaks to you, and let the internet argue about something else.
Common mistakes to avoid:
First, don’t start writing before you’ve committed to an idea. It’s tempting, I know. It’s October, October is ages away from November, and you’re excited. You want to start typing. Resist. The point of this prep series is to get you to November with a clear head and a strong foundation. If you start dribbling out chapters now, you’ll burn the excitement before the race even begins. Save the energy for the starting line.
Second, don’t pick the biggest idea in the hope that inspiration will carry you. It won’t. Big ideas run out of steam just like small ones, except they run out of steam with more guilt attached, because you feel like you should be able to manage something so grand. Pick the idea that fits thirty days. This isn’t your life’s work. It’s a draft. The life’s work can come later.
Third, don’t confuse excitement with length. An idea that excites you to the point of compulsion is perfect for NaNoWriMo. An idea that excites you because of its scope – because it’s huge, or ambitious, or would require years of research – is a different kind of excitement, and it won’t carry you. When you talk about your idea, are you excited about writing it, or are you excited about having written it? If it’s the second, pick something smaller.
Fourth, don’t force an idea you’re not passionate about because you think it’s more likely to sell. Novels don’t sell well when they’re written by reluctant authors. Readers can smell boredom. They can smell obligation. They can smell the difference between a story written with love and a story written with strategy. Even if you finish the 50,000 words, you’ll have produced something that doesn’t resonate with your imagination, and that’s a wasted November. Write the idea you love. Figure out the publishing later.
Fifth, don’t panic if you don’t have “the one.” The deadline is November, not next week. You have 4 weeks before NaNoWriMo starts. Ideas are everywhere – in the things you love, in the things you fear, in the strange corners of your memory, in the collision of two obsessions. If no idea is leaping out at you yet, keep looking. Keep noticing. Keep the list. The idea is out there, waiting. And it’s much more likely to find you if you’re looking for it than if you’re sitting with your hands folded, waiting to be chosen.
Key Takeaways:
First, the right idea for NaNoWriMo is not the most impressive idea. It’s the idea that excites you, that you can’t stop thinking about, that will still carry you on day twenty-two.
Second, originality is overrated. Everything has been done. What hasn’t been done is you telling the story. Focus on what moves you, and the originality will take care of itself.
Third, ideas are everywhere once you learn to notice them: in your obsessions, in your history, in the books you love, in the newspapers, in the collisions between two unrelated interests.
Fourth, choose an idea you can finish in 30,000 words – wait, no, 50,000. (See, even I make mistakes.) Choose an idea with a middle, a clear centre, and a scale that fits thirty days.
Fifth, trust your own judgment. You’re the one who has to write it. Choose the idea that speaks to you, and ignore everyone else’s opinion.
Wrapping Up
Finding the idea that excites you is the most important thing you’ll do before November. Get it wrong, and every day of NaNoWriMo becomes a battle – a war of attrition between your enthusiasm and your doubt, fought on the battlefield of a story you don’t really care about. Get it right, and NaNoWriMo becomes something different. It becomes a love letter. A fifty-thousand-word love letter to a story you couldn’t stop thinking about.
So take your time with this. Fall in love with something. Not with the idea of being a novelist, although that’s lovely too, but with a story. A character. A situation. A question. Something that makes you want to sit down at a desk every single day for a month and move 50,000 words of dream from your head into the world.
Because that’s the truth at the heart of this whole series: NaNoWriMo isn’t a test of discipline. It’s a test of love. The writers who succeed aren’t the ones with the most self-control. They’re the ones who love their stories enough to keep going when self-control runs out. So find an idea you love. Not a good idea. Not a sensible idea. Not an idea that will impress your mum. An idea you love. A story you can’t not write. And the words will follow.
In the next post in this series, we’ll take that idea and start giving it flesh – working out your characters and the world they live in. But for now, your only job is to find the idea that makes your heart beat faster.