Medium NaNoWriMo Novel Prompt #1

In honor of National Novel Writing Month 2015, Medium is offering a weekly writing prompt now through the beginning of December to spark your imagination and help you write fifty thousand words in November!

The prompt for October 22nd is …

What is the best novel-writing advice you have received?

For my senior thesis, I decided to write a historical fiction piece about medieval Italy during the Black Death in 1348 (cheery, I know). My thesis revolved around how people in different aspects of Italian society would have been impacted by the plague. To do this, I created four distinct characters: a noblewoman, a Jewish merchant, a doctor, and a priest. These were such diverse characters with so many secondary characters involved, I struggled to make them feel real and to truly convey the despair they would have felt during the Black Death.

My professor, who I worked one on one with during the process, told me to create a family tree of all my characters with a detailed description of their life. At the time, it sounded like busy work since I had long ago determined which characters would make appearances in my novel. However, as I drew out the tree, with ages, births, deaths, and other familial milestones, my characters became real people, with hope for their future, fears from their past, and desires for their present.

Now, I wasn’t simply jumping into a tumultuous time in my character’s lives and forcing them into situations, but rather I was meeting them at a defining crossroad — a crossroad they were at because of who they were and where they stood in Italian society at the time of the plague.

Ever since then, whenever I plan out a new novel, the first thing I do is create a detailed background for all primary (and some secondary) characters. NaNoWriMo has a great worksheet to help you develop the background of your character on their site to get you started.

What was the best advice you’ve received, and how did it help you write your novel?