2021 PlanMo Journal Challenge Master Post
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Hello, hello, and welcome to Planning Month (PlanMo)! October is the time to prepare for National Novel Writing Month (NaNo) in November, and we hope the activities we have this month will help you with that.
In the PlanMo club, you can start your own thread. In your thread, record your responses to the challenges, so you can refer back to them when writing later. You can work through the following challenges at your own time and pace. Feel free to do as many or as few of them as you want.
(There may be some badges for those participating, and that's just an extra incentive to give this a try!)
Here are the challenges for the month.
Main Challenges:
Elevator pitch
Character tweets
Plotting: graph or list
Outline a difficult plot point
Main character's motivations
Protagonist and antagonist
Question & answer
Extra Credit Challenges:
Character & location List
Character questionnaire
Outline a difficult scene
Watch out for the club wall towards the end of October, when we'll post some more detailed guidance on each challenge. Feel free to ask questions anytime!
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Elevator pitch
An elevator pitch, elevator speech, or elevator statement is a short description of an idea, product, or company that explains the concept in a way such that any listener can understand it in a short period of time. Describe your novel as though it were an elevator pitch.
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Character tweets
Character tweets. How would your characters introduce themselves to social media? Write their first tweet. You can do one for as many of your characters as you like, but remember you only have 280 characters.
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Plotting: graph or list
When it comes to plotting, you could 1. Draw the events as a graph 2. Write a list of everything important that happens and in the margins make note of what happens in between. Do the scenes unfold in the story in chronological order, or are there flashbacks/flashforwards?
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Outline a difficult plot point
Outline a part of your plot that you're unsure about or struggling with and post it on the PlanMo club wall. Then go around reading and commenting on other people's posts, making suggestions or noting any potential plot holes.
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Main character's motivations
Think about your main character's motivations. What does your main character want (the story goal)? What do they really need? Are these one and the same thing, or do they differ from each other?
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Protagonist and antagonist
Think about what your main character and your villain/ antagonist have in common. Do they have a lot of similarities? Or are they extremely different from each other, like polar opposites?
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Question & answer
Questions! Post some questions in your entry, then, go round other journals answering questions with your thoughts. This month is likely to lead to different realisations for different people, or maybe some people are more experienced with NaNo than others. Either way, we are sure that if you ask a question of the YWS hivemind, the YWS hivemind will answer.
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Character & location List
List down all the characters and locations that will or might appear in the story. Include some that seem unlikely, but might for example be a cool setting to add to a scene that needs some spice. You could also include some names or general descriptions for supporting/ background characters that you might need in a hurry.
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Character questionnaire
Fill out the following questionnaire from the NaNo site about at least one of your side characters, though the more you do the more prepared you will be.
Spoiler! :
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