Young Writers Society

These are prompts for your novel/story planning journal! Feel free to write up your responses to these and post them in your Camp thread. You can refer to this thread whenever you need some help with planning or an inspo boost throughout the month.

'Main' Challenge Collection

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.

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.

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?

Outline a difficult plot point

Outline a part of your plot that you're unsure about or struggling with and post it. Then go around reading and commenting on other people's posts, making suggestions or noting any potential plot holes.

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?

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?

Question & answer

Questions! Post some questions in your entry, then, go round other threads 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.

Extra Challenges

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.

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.



Outline a difficult scene

What's a scene you're not very enthusiastic about OR are nervous to write? Outline it and see what you can do to prepare for that scene (or see if it needs to be in there at all).