All right, it’s official: I’m doing NaNo (aka National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo). And I’m spending the month of October preparing. I’ve got my plot outlined, I’m getting to know my characters, I’m researching the facts and the settings, pondering plot points and villains and subplots and schedules (Mine, not the characters’)!

As I’ve worked on all these things, I’ve had to review all my favorite plotting methods and character posts—on others’ blogs, and on my own. So if you’re getting ready for NaNoWriMo, here are some resources on my site that I’ve been thinking about and studying, and I hope they might help you prepare, too.

The plot thickens, my series on plotting, highlights plot structures and methods including the three act structure, Larry Brooks’s story structure, the Snowflake method and the Hero’s Journey (also available as a PDF).

Creating sympathetic characters—while you can edit a great deal of sympathy into your characters, keeping these things in mind as you write can help you get it right the first time.

Character arcs—this was the series I needed most, specifically this post on finding your character’s arc. (Is it awesome or sad when you find the most amazingly helpful resource was written by you two years ago?)

Backstory—figuring out your character’s lifestory, what to leave out, and where to start your story.

And, depending on how you write, you might be able to try out some new techniques with Deep POV or dialogue—or save those for editing.

Are you NaNoing?