NaNoWriMo
In the last post, we talked about finding the idea that excites you – the story you can’t stop thinking about, the one that’ll still carry you on day twenty-two of NaNoWriMo when the words are grinding and your fingers ache and the middle of your novel is trying to swallow you whole. If you read that post and went away with an idea burning in your chest, brilliant. If you didn’t and you’re still looking, that’s fine too – keep looking, and it’ll come.
But if you’ve got your idea, then it’s time for the next step. Because an idea is not yet a novel. An idea is a spark. A novel is a fire, and fire needs fuel. The fuel of a novel is two things: the people who live in it, and the world they live in. Characters and world. And this post is about exactly that – how to work out your characters and your story’s world, without drowning yourself in prep work that keeps you from ever writing a single word in November.
There’s a temptation, when you’re getting ready for NaNoWriMo, to over-prepare. I’ve seen writers spend the whole of October building armies of characters, drawing maps of continents, writing thousand-year histories of their fantasy kingdoms. I’ve seen people create thirty-page bibles for worlds that will never even be mentioned in the novel. And I’ve seen those same writers burn out spectacularly, arriving at November first with no energy left, having spent all their enthusiasm on prep that never made it onto the page.
So let me say this clearly, early in this post: your prep has one job, and only one job. It is to give you enough of a foundation that you can start writing on November first and keep going until the end of the month. That’s it. You’re not building the full world. You’re building a runway. Enough character to know who you’re writing about. Enough world to know where you are. And then you write, and the rest – the detail, the depth, the texture – comes while you’re flying.
A little history
The way writers prepare their characters and worlds has changed enormously over the centuries, and it’s worth understanding the history, because it explains why so much advice out there is contradictory and confusing.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most novelists didn’t prepare anything at all, at least not in the way we understand it. Charles Dickens didn’t sit down and write character bibles. He sat down at his desk, imagining the next instalment of his serial, drawing his characters from the teeming life of London he’d absorbed through years of observation. Jane Austen didn’t research her characters; she’d been observing the society she wrote about her entire life. The preparation was invisible because it was lifelong. These writers had been soaking up their worlds for decades before they ever put pen to paper.
The twentieth century changed this. The arrival of method acting in theatre – the idea that an actor should fully inhabit a character’s psychology, history, and inner life – bled into the writing world. Playwrights and screenwriters began creating detailed character backgrounds. At the same time, the explosion of genreGenre refers to the books that have some strong element in them that defines them as a particular type of book, such as fantasy, romance, or crime fiction. These types of novels have required tropes, and if the novel doesn't have those, it's not that genre. Readers expect to see those tropes and are disappointed if they're not there. Refers to either a general classification of writing, such as the novel or the poem, or to the categories within those classifications, such as the thriller or action story. Genre lets your reader know what to expect from your writing. More fiction – fantasy, science fiction – created a new problem: writers had to invent worlds that didn’t exist, which meant they had to think about things you can take for granted in a contemporary novel. So the world bible was born. Elaborate documents detailing the geography, history, politics, and culture of invented worlds. The modern template was set.
And with it came the great schism that still divides the writing community today: architects versus gardeners. Planners versus pantsers. Those who prepare everything before they write, and those who discover as they go. George R.R. Martin famously described himself as a gardener – someone who plants seeds and watches them grow, discovering his characters and worlds as he writes. Stephen King calls himself a similar kind of writer, starting with a situation and letting it unfold. E.L. James, by contrast, reportedly wrote scenes on index cards and mapped them meticulously before drafting.
Here’s the truth that must be said out loud, in a post specifically about prep: there is no right answer. Some writers need detailed prep. Others find it suffocating. And critically for NaNoWriMo, the amount of prep you do is a personal choice – but for this specific challenge, the cavalry point is that prep should be a servant, not a master. If prep is helping you write, do more of it. If it’s delaying writing, do less. If you’re a gardener – if the idea of outlining your characters in advance makes your imagination wither – then this post’s advice is simple: prepare just enough to point yourself at November, and no more.
Working out your characters
Let’s talk about characters first, because characters are the heart of any novel. A reader can forgive a lot – a wobbling plot, a gloomy setting, the occasional clunky sentence – but they will not forgive a cast of characters they don’t care about. Characters are why we read. Characters are who we love, worry about, root for, and cry over. If your characters are alive, your novel is alive, whatever else is wrong with it.
But here’s the thing about working out characters before you write: there are two schools of thought, and you need to know which one you belong to.
The school of knowing
The first school says: know everything about your characters before you write. Their full name, their date of birth, their star sign, their favourite food, the scar they got when they were seven, the thing their mother whispered to them the night they left home. This approach was popularised by the “character questionnaire” – those endless lists of questions designed to make your character fully formed before you set pen to paper.
There’s real value in this approach. Knowing your character inside out means you never hesitate mid-scene, wondering “would she say this? Would he do this?” The answers come instantly because you know them. And a character with a detailed inner life tends to feel more real on the page, because the writer’s confidence in them leaks through.
The danger is that the questionnaire becomes a substitute for writing. You can spend October creating the most beautiful, detailed characters – forty pages of backstory, psychology, and inner conflictConflict is the struggle a character goes through in pursuit of a goal. It's what makes it harder for her to accomplish a task or make a decision in the novel. It's at the core of every scene and what has to be overcome for the character to achieve her goal. It can be both external (a plot conflict) or internal (a character arc conflict). Basically, conflict is what makes things emotionally harder for the protagonist to make choices that affect the plot of the novel. The opposition driving the entire plot of a story and presenting obstacles to the protagonist on a macro and micro level. – and still have no novel, because the preparation has consumed the energy the writing needs. It’s like planning a road trip so thoroughly that you run out of petrol before you leave the driveway.
The school of knowing just enough
The second school says: know just enough to begin, and let the writing reveal the rest. You need to know your protagonist’s name, their desire, their wound, and their voice. That’s roughly it. The rest – their favourite food, the scar from when they were seven – will emerge naturally as you write, the way you learn things about a new friend gradually over the course of months.
This approach has a different kind of value. It keeps the character alive and surprising – not just to the writer, but to the reader. There’s a danger, with fully-outlined characters, that they become predictable, because the writer knows exactly what they’re going to do in every situation and never lets them do anything else. A character who’s discovered as you write can shock you. And a character who shocks the writer often shocks the reader too.
The danger of this approach is that you can start writing with only half an idea of who your protagonist is, and spend the first ten chapters flailing around, trying to find their voice, producing pages of a character who feels like a stranger to you. That’s not a disaster – it’s what revision is for – but in a thirty-day challenge, it can eat up precious time.
So, what’s the balance for NaNoWriMo? I’d recommend a hybrid. For your protagonist, know these four things with total clarity: what they want, what they’re afraid of, what they believe about themselves, and what they believe about the world. Those four are the engine of the novel. Everything else – the likes, the dislikes, the quirks, the history – you can discover as you write. Name them. Place them. Give them a desire and a wound. Then let November do the rest.
For your supporting cast, know even less. A sentence or two each: who they are, what they want, how they relate to the protagonist. Keep it skeletal. The danger with secondary characters is over-preparing them – giving them rich inner lives that have nowhere to go in the draft. That’s not love; it’s padding. Let them be who they need to be for the story, and let the story teach you who they are.
“When you know what your character wants and fears, you know everything you need to know in order to write them.” – Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood, who has written more memorable characters than most of us could dream of, understood that want and fear are the whole engine. Everything else a character does is a variation on those two themes. Know the desire, know the wound, and your character will write themselves.
Working out your story’s world
Now for the world. This is where writers, especially genreGenre refers to the books that have some strong element in them that defines them as a particular type of book, such as fantasy, romance, or crime fiction. These types of novels have required tropes, and if the novel doesn't have those, it's not that genre. Readers expect to see those tropes and are disappointed if they're not there. Refers to either a general classification of writing, such as the novel or the poem, or to the categories within those classifications, such as the thriller or action story. Genre lets your reader know what to expect from your writing. More writers, can drown. I’ve seen the world bibles. I’ve seen the twenty-page histories, the elaborate maps, the glossaries of fantasy slang. I’ve also seen the novels those writers never finished, because the worldbuilding had become an end in itself.
Here’s the distinction that saves you: your story’s world is not the same as your worldbuilding. Your worldbuilding is everything you can imagine about the world – all of it, the full history, the complete geography, the entire culture. Your story’s world is only the part of that world that appears in your story. And for NaNoWriMo, the second is all you need.
Let me say that again, because it’s important: for the purposes of this challenge, you don’t need to build your whole world. You need to build the world the reader will see – the village, the city, the spaceship, the country, the family kitchen where the story happens. The rest of the world can be implied. The reader, bless them, will fill in the gaps with their imagination. Your job is to make sure the visible parts are solid.
So what does working out your story’s world actually involve? Three questions, and three questions only.
First: where is the story set, and what’s the texture of that place? Is it a rain-soaked city in the north of England? A glittering desert with three suns? A council estate in the 1980s? A starship the size of a moon? Get specific. What does it look like? What does it smell like? What’s the weather? (Weather is the most underrated character in fiction – a rain-swept street tells a different story than a baking terrace.) You need enough of this texture to write scenes, but not a whole atlas.
Second: what are the rules that matter for your story? Every world has rules – the rules of its magic, its technology, its politics, its society. But you don’t need to know all of them. You need to know the ones that matter for your plot. If your story depends on a magic system, understand how it works for the purposes of your scenes. If it depends on a political hierarchy, understand who has power and who hasn’t. If it depends on a technology, understand its limits. But no more. The moment you start designing a magic system that never appears in the story, you’re building worldbuilding for its own sake.
And third: what are your world’s values? This is the one most writers skip, and it’s often the most useful. A world’s values shape behaviour. If your society values honour over life, your characters will duel at dawn. If it values obedience, your characters will hide their true feelings. If it values wealth, your characters will lie about their family. Understanding your world’s values gives you a shortcut to character behaviour – you know what’s expected of your protagonist, which means you know what they’re fighting against.
That last point is the joy of it. The world is the antagonist’s ally. It’s the pressure that shapes your characters. That’s why your story’s world matters for NaNoWriMo: not for its own sake, but because it’s the machine your characters are trapped in. Know the machine well enough that you can feel it around you when you write, and your readers will feel it too.
Some guidelines:
Here are five guidelines for getting your characters and world prep right, without letting it swallow the month.
First, keep the prep short. A page of notes on your protagonist. A page on your world – its texture, its rules, its values. A list of your supporting cast with a sentence each. That’s it. If your prep fits on one side of paper, you’ve done enough. If it needs a ring binder, you’ve probably done too much. You can always add more as you write. You can’t get November back once it’s gone.
Second, make the prep about the story, not about the world. Every question you ask yourself should be traceable to the plot. “Does this character detail matter for the story?” If yes, keep it. If no, cut it. “Does this piece of worldbuilding affect the plot?” If yes, develop it. If no, burn it. Prep in service of story. Never prep in service of prep.
Third, prioritise your protagonist above everything. They’re the one you need to know best. Give them desire, fear, belief, and voice. If you know those four, you can write them. Everything else is furniture – nice to have, but not essential.
Fourth, remember the reader’s imagination is on your side. You don’t need to have described the whole world in your notes for the reader to feel the world is alive. In fact, the opposite is usually true: worlds feel alive when they’re only partly visible, when the reader senses there’s more over the horizon. Your prep can be partial. Your world should feel vast. Those are compatible, because the vastness comes from the reader, not from you.
Fifth, leave room for surprise. Even in your prep, leave room for the story to teach you things. The protagonist might develop a hobby you never planned. The world might reveal a flaw you didn’t design. Let it. November is a discovery. Your prep is the map of where you’re going, not a cage for what you’ll find.
Common mistakes to avoid:
First, don’t over-prepare the world at the expense of the characters. The world without characters is a brochure. The characters without a world are a vacuum. If you have a choice between developing your world’s history and developing your protagonist’s inner life, choose the protagonist. Every time.
Second, don’t prepare second-tier characters to death. It’s tempting to give every character a full backstory, a rich inner life, and a secret tragic history. Resist. Secondary characters exist to serve the story. Give them enough that they feel real, and no more. You can always deepen them later if the story demands it.
Third, don’t let preparation become procrastination. This is the big one. There’s a fine line between “preparing to write” and “avoiding writing,” and the line is crossed far more often than we admit. Ask yourself honestly: am I doing this prep because it helps, or because writing is scary? If the answer is the second – and be honest – then stop prepping and go and write. The prep can continue in a morning. The writing can’t be put off forever.
Fourth, don’t feel you must match other people’s prep styles. Your friend is outlining forty chapters with scene cards and full character biographies. Your other friend is starting November with an idea and a dream. Neither is wrong. There is no gold standard for prep. There’s only what works for you. If you’re a gardener, garden. If you’re an architect, build. But own your style, and don’t let comparison steal your sleep.
Fifth, don’t forget that you can change everything. Nothing you write in your prep is sacred. The protagonist’s name, the world’s rules, the setting’s texture – all of it can change the moment you start writing. Prep is a promise to yourself, not a contract with the universe. If the story wants to go somewhere else, the prep should follow the story, not the other way round.
Key Takeaways:
First, your prep has one job: to give you a runway for November. Enough character to know who you’re writing, enough world to know where you are, and then you’re off.
Second, know your protagonist inside out – desire, fear, belief about self, belief about world. Know everyone else just enough to place them. The rest will emerge as you write.
Third, your story’s world is not your worldbuilding. You need only the part of the world that appears in the story. Texture, rules, and values – that’s the whole job.
Fourth, prep in service of story. Every detail you develop should be traceable to the plot. If it doesn’t serve the story, it’s scaffolding, and scaffolding comes down.
Fifth, leave room for surprise. November is a discovery. Prep is your map, not your cage. Let the story teach you things you didn’t plan, and it’ll reward you with characters and worlds that feel truly alive.
Wrapping Up
Characters and world. The people and the place. Between them, they hold almost everything a novel is made of. And getting them right doesn’t mean getting them exhaustive – it means getting them just enough right to begin. That’s the gift of this preparation. It’s not about building a complete universe on your desk in October. It’s about building just enough of a foundation that you can start with confidence on November first.
So go and meet your protagonist. Find out what they want and what they’re afraid of. Spend ten minutes standing in their world – feel its weather, learn its rules, understand its values. And then stop. Put the notes away. Leave room for the discovery. Because the best characters and worlds aren’t the ones that are fully formed before you write. They’re the ones that unfold as you write, growing in your hands like something alive, surprising you, teaching you, leading you somewhere you didn’t plan to go.
That’s the magic of November. You’ll meet your characters properly in the writing. You’ll discover your world in the prose. The prep is just the introduction – enough to know you’re in the right place, with the right people, before the lights go up and the story begins.
In the next post, we’ll look at your story’s setting and your premiseThe premise is the general description of a novel's idea. It's the basic story or concept. A two to three sentence description of your plot or core argument. – how to sharpen the one-sentence version of your novel that’ll keep you pointed at the truth of why you’re writing it, even on the hard days. For now, spend your October introduction wisely. And enjoy it. This is the part where the book is young, and everything is possible.