A writer's desk at night with a glowing amber lamp, steaming mug, open notebook, and manuscript pages, beside a rain-streaked window where autumn leaves drift past a crescent moon and dark, otherworldly spires.

November Novel Writing Challenge: A 30-Day Plan for Speculative Writers Without Burnout

How many speculative fiction writers does it take to draft a novel in November? Just one, but she’ll spend the first nine days naming the moons.

November is drafting month. It has been for a long time, and plenty of writers are already a day or two in. If you are one of them, or you are thinking about jumping in late, this post is a 30-day plan for drafting a speculative novel without wrecking yourself by Thanksgiving.

A quick bit of history first. From 2007 through 2018 I hit the goal in NaNoWriMo every year, and my total on that site came to 1,636,690 words. The nonprofit that ran it announced it was closing in 2025, after 20 years (The Guardian). The organization went away. The habit didn’t. Writers still try to write a novel in a month every November, alone, with friends, or in whatever community they’ve found online. You don’t need anyone’s permission or website to do it.

Set your own November novel writing challenge

The traditional target was 50,000 words in 30 days. That works out to about 1,667 words a day if you write every single day. Some people can do that. Some people can do that while working a full-time job. Some people will be miserable by the second week and quit.

Pick a number that fits your life, not somebody else’s. A few honest options:

The full draft. 50,000 words or more. Good if you have time, a solid idea, and some drafting miles behind you.
The half draft. 25,000 to 30,000 words. Gets you through the first half of a novel, which is where many drafts die anyway.
The time goal. A fixed number of minutes a day instead of words. Useful if your job, family, or health make word counts feel like a threat.

Whatever you choose, set two numbers: a floor and a target. The floor is the smallest amount that still counts as a writing day. Make it embarrassingly small, like 200 words or 15 minutes. The target is what you’re actually aiming for. On good days you hit the target. On bad days you hit the floor and go to bed. Either way, you didn’t break the chain.

Then plan rest days before you need them. If you take one day off each week, you’re writing on 26 of the 30 days. Fifty thousand words over 26 days is about 1,923 a day. That’s higher than 1,667, but now the rest is part of the plan instead of a failure you have to make up.

Before day one: a short prep list for drafting a speculative novel

If you’re already a few days in, do this tonight instead of writing. It will save you more time than it costs.

Speculative writers have a special trap in November. We love building worlds. Magic systems, star charts, political maps, the history of the third dynasty of the river kings. All of it is fun, and none of it is the draft. I’ve written about worldbuilding tools for authors and game masters, and they have their place. That place is mostly October and December.

For November, keep the prep to one page each:

The rules sheet. What can magic or technology do in this world, what does it cost, and what can’t it do? Five to ten lines. If you need more, you’ll find out while drafting.
The want sheet. What does your protagonist want, what does your antagonist want, and why can’t they both get it? If the villain’s goal is vague, the middle of your book will be too. My post on villains covers what makes an antagonist worth the page time.
The signpost list. Five or six scenes you know have to happen: the opening, the point of no return, the midpoint twist, the low point, the climax, and the last scene. You don’t need a full outline. You need lights to drive toward in the dark.
The parking lot. A blank file for every question you’ll be tempted to research mid-scene. How long does it take to fall from orbit? What do the river kings call their crowns? Write the question in the parking lot and keep drafting.

That last one matters more than it looks. Every time you stop to look something up, you lose the scene. Use a placeholder in brackets, like [MOON NAME] or [CHECK ORBIT MATH], and move on. You can search your manuscript for brackets in December.

The 30-day plan, week by week

This plan assumes you’re writing a single novel in four acts of roughly a week each, with a couple of days of slack at the end. Adjust the days if you started late. The order matters more than the dates.

Days 1 to 7: get the engine running

The first week is about momentum, not quality. Write the opening, get your protagonist moving, and reach your first signpost.

Start as close to the trouble as you can. You can add the slow morning later if you really need it.
Write the scenes you’re excited about first if the opening won’t come. Nobody says you have to draft in order.
Track words or minutes every day, even on floor days. Seeing the number go up is half the fuel.

The big risk this week is going too fast. If you write 5,000 words on day one because you’re thrilled, you may pay for it with a crash on day four. Steady beats heroic.

Days 8 to 14: get through the sag

The second week is where most drafts stall. The shiny opening is done, the ending is far away, and the middle feels like wading through mud.

Two tools help here. The first is pressure. Give your characters a deadline they can’t ignore: an air supply running out, a ritual that happens at the next eclipse, a fleet arriving in nine days. I covered how to build one in my post on ticking clock storytelling. A clock in the plot tends to put a clock in your typing fingers, too.

The second tool is skipping. If your hero is stuck in quicksand and you don’t know how she gets out, jump ahead to the scene where she walks into the next town and keep going. Your brain will work out the bridge later. I wrote about this and a few other ways around a stall in Defense Against the Dark Arts: Writer’s Block Edition.

Illustration (invented example): Your colony ship story bogs down on day ten because you can’t figure out how the engineer learns about the sabotage. Leave a bracket note, [SHE FINDS OUT SOMEHOW], and write the scene where she confronts the captain. The confrontation tells you what she must have found, and you fill in the discovery scene next week.

Days 15 to 21: hit the midpoint and turn the screws

Week three is when the story changes direction. Something the protagonist believed turns out to be wrong, the stakes go up, or the antagonist makes a move that changes the board.

For speculative fiction, the midpoint is a great place to let the world’s rules bite. The magic has a cost the hero didn’t expect. The technology fails in a way the setting has been hinting at. The alien message means something else. If you set up your rules sheet, this is where it pays off.

This is also the week burnout likes to show up. Watch for these signs:

You dread opening the file.
You’re skipping sleep to make your numbers.
You’ve stopped doing the things that keep you sane, like walks, meals with people, or the occasional night off.

If you see them, drop to your floor for two or three days. You’re not quitting. You’re downshifting so the engine doesn’t throw a rod.

Days 22 to 28: write the ending

Finish the book, even if it’s rough. The ending is the signpost you’ve been driving toward all month, and drafting it changes how you see everything before it.

Write the climax even if the middle has holes. A draft with an ending and gaps is easier to fix than a draft without one.
Let the protagonist pay for the win. A clean, free victory feels hollow in any genre, and in speculative fiction the world’s costs should come due here.
If you’re running behind your target, cut scope, not sleep. Summarize a scene in two lines and keep going.

Thanksgiving lands in this stretch for writers in the United States, so plan around it. Bank a few extra words the week before, or call that day a rest day ahead of time.

Days 29 and 30: stop drafting and leave notes

Use the last two days as a buffer. If you’re behind, catch up. If you finished, don’t start revising. Write yourself a short letter instead: what the book turned out to be about, which threads you dropped, what the brackets are hiding, and what you’d change first.

Then close the file and leave it alone for a while. When you come back, look for the flat, summarized passages first and turn them into scenes. My post on show, don’t tell with active voice in speculative fiction is a good place to start that pass. If your world felt thin or overloaded, my post on sci-fi worldbuilding that serves the story covers how to tell the difference.

How to write a novel in a month without burning out

A few habits make the whole month easier. None of them are magic.

Write at the same time each day if you can. A fixed slot means you aren’t deciding whether to write every day. You already decided.

Stop in the middle of a sentence. It sounds silly, but it means you know exactly where to start tomorrow, and the first few words come easier.

Don’t reread yesterday’s pages in full. Read the last paragraph, then write. Rereading leads to editing, and editing in November leads to a perfect first chapter and no book.

Count everything that moves the book forward. If a scene won’t come and you write a page of notes about why, that page helped. Count it.

Keep the rest of your life running. Eat real food. Sleep. Move around. My own writing grew up alongside a long career in IT and technical teaching, and the day job doesn’t take November off. Plan around it. A novel draft is not worth your health.

Celebrate the floor days. On a bad day, 200 words is a win. A month of small wins adds up to a draft.

What if you fall behind?

You probably will at some point. That’s normal, and it doesn’t mean the month is over.

Don’t try to make up a big deficit in one weekend. Spread it out. If you’re 5,000 words behind with ten days left, that’s 500 extra words a day, which is a lot less scary than a 5,000-word Saturday.

Or change the goal. If 50,000 isn’t going to happen, aim for 30,000 and a complete outline of the rest. Goals can shift when the facts change. I wrote about that in Shifting Your Goals, and it applies in November as much as in January.

The point of drafting month was never the number. It’s having a draft on December 1 that you didn’t have on November 1, and still wanting to write in December. Keep that in sight.

Now close this tab and go write something.

Sources

Ella Creamer, “Scandal-hit creative writing website NaNoWriMo to close after 20 years,” The Guardian, April 2, 2025: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/02/creative-writing-nanowrimo-to-close-after-20-years (closure announcement, 50,000 words in November as the traditional target)
Guy Anthony De Marco, Bio: https://guyanthonydemarco.com/bio/ (November challenge wins 2007 through 2018, 1,636,690 total words, IT and technical teaching career)