Op-Ed: Writing a novel? Here are four things you need to know.

This month, more than 300,000 souls will participate in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, an annual ritual in which, as the name suggests, one attempts to write an entire novel in a month that doesn’t even have 31 days. If you are one of the hardy (or foolhardy) individuals embarking on this ambitious endeavor, I salute you. I also have some advice: Brace yourself.

At some point, likely around the time you are tempted to procrastinate by reading the Los Angeles Times (hello!), the glorious euphoria of beginning to write a novel will start to fade. The words will no longer flow so easily. It will stop being fun. It will begin to feel like work.

Your novel, in other words, will begin to bite back. This is a good thing. It means your novel has started to come to life and is now a creature that inspires both fear and love. It also means that you must begin to approach your task with rigor, craft and steely resolve. Here are four tips for taming your beast:

Make sure you have a plot.

That sounds obvious, I know. But you’d be amazed by how many people start novels without knowing where they want to end up, as if they were taking a leisurely stroll through the woods. In each case, without a map, there’s a high risk of getting hopelessly lost. Novels are not a random series of events that somehow coalesce into a pleasing narrative. Whether you are writing a literary novel or a potboiler, you need a plot.

Plots consist of four important elements, and you need them all:

Something happens to set the protagonist’s life ajar. This can be as simple as a vague feeling of disquiet, or as complicated as discovering that the protagonist’s brain has been swapped with a penguin’s.

The protagonist goes on a journey to try to get something she really wants. This can be a mental journey like achieving serenity, or a physical journey like a perilous voyage to battle the penguin king.

The protagonist encounters obstacles along the way, such as inner demons or a sea lion that is not as benevolent as its handsome whiskers would suggest.

The quest and battling of obstacles culminates in a climax. And, hopefully, the protagonist gets her brain back. (But maybe not!)

If you’re stuck, make sure you know what your main character wants, then plant a big obstacle in her way. Oh, and by the way, your idea for a coming-of-age story? Or for a novel about a man who finds redemption by eating his way through an entire continent? Without obstacles, those aren’t plots. Those are themes. Try again.

Be mean to your characters (don’t worry, they can handle it).

It’s easy to grow fond of the fictional people with whom you’re sharing more time than your real-life loved ones. It’s tempting to want to coddle them, and to cringe when you think about them making mistakes or doing horrible things that expose their flaws. Set these feelings aside. Don’t be nice. Let your characters fail. Reveal their bad sides, their cranky sides, the sides that they would feel embarrassed for the world to see. Better yet, construct your entire novel around the idea that you need to show the whole spectrum of their personalities, good and bad. Let the reader see your characters sweat.

Worried that your characters are flat? Unleash their worst qualities. Things will liven up in no time.

Don’t neglect your family (too much).

Once you really get into a groove, it’s tempting to hunker down in a fictional world for a month and ignore everyone around you. And to a certain degree, writing a novel really does require carving out time alone that could be spent, you know, conversing. (I think I remember what that is.) But if you block out the world too much, you’ll go insane. Even worse — from an artistic standpoint — you’ll lose perspective and won’t give your brain the space for new ideas. Strike a balance, even during NaNoWriMo.

Keep writing.

The best thing about NaNoWriMo is that it forces you to adopt the one solution to every writing problem that has ever existed: Keep writing.

Think your last chapter was terrible? Keep writing. Have absolutely no idea what should happen next? Keep writing. It’s only Nov. 5, and you have 47,243 words left to write, but you already feel as if you have scaled Mt. Everest? Keep writing.

Nathan Bransford is the author of “How to Write a Novel: 47 Rules for Writing a Stupendously Awesome Novel That You Will Love Forever” and the “Jacob Wonderbar” series. He blogs at nathanbransford.com.

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