The Pre-Writing Checklist: What to Settle Before Chapter One
I once opened a blank document on a Tuesday morning, wrote "Chapter One" at the top, and had eleven thousand words by the following Monday. I felt unstoppable. Then I hit a scene where my protagonist needed to confront her brother, and I realized I had never decided whether they had one conversation in the last decade or a dozen. I did not know his name for certain -- I had used both "Daniel" and "Dana" in different chapters, as if my fingers were arguing with each other. The draft stalled for six weeks while I went back and built the things I should have built before I ever wrote "Chapter One."
Pre-writing is not the enemy of momentum. It is what momentum is made of. Anne Lamott's advice in Bird by Bird is to write "shitty first drafts" without judging them, and I believe that completely -- but a shitty first draft still needs a premise that holds, a protagonist with a name that does not change, and a rough sense of where the story ends. George R.R. Martin's old distinction between "architects," who draw the blueprint before laying a brick, and "gardeners," who plant a seed and see what grows, gets quoted constantly, and both camps benefit from this checklist. Architects need it to draw the blueprint. Gardeners need it to know what kind of garden they are planting before the first shoot appears.
Run through the sections below before you write your opening line, not after you have written forty thousand words and discovered a hole in the foundation.
The Premise Passes a Simple Test
Protagonist, goal, obstacle. If you cannot compress the book to a single sentence, the idea may still be a mood or a setting rather than a story. That is fine at this stage, but know the difference before you draft two hundred pages around a feeling.
Not "what happens" but "will she." Will she forgive him. Will he find the ship in time. A premise without a live question tends to produce a manuscript that wanders, because there is nothing for the reader -- or you -- to keep asking.
Not the final line. Just the outcome: does she get what she wants, and at what cost. Stephen King famously distrusts outlines and still knows, by his own account, roughly where a book is headed before he commits to it. Knowing the destination and knowing every turn on the road are different things -- you only need the first one right now.
Your Protagonist Can Survive Contact With the Page
Write them down somewhere you will actually check. My six-week stall happened because I trusted my memory instead of a document. A one-line character sheet costs ten minutes and saves you from renaming someone mid-book.
What your protagonist wants is the plot engine. What they need is the emotional one. E.M. Forster made the case in Aspects of the Novel that readers remember characters who surprise them yet remain believable -- and a character whose want and need pull in opposite directions is where that surprise usually comes from.
Something in the past that explains the shape of their fear. You do not need to explain it to the reader on page one, or possibly ever directly. You need to know it so every choice your protagonist makes has a reason underneath it.
The World Has Enough Rules to Stand On
A real city or an invented one, a real decade or an invented calendar -- either is fine, but "sometime, somewhere" tends to produce prose with nothing to push against. Specificity is free and it changes everything downstream.
Magic, technology, a court system, a corporate hierarchy -- whatever your story depends on, know what it costs to use and what it cannot do. Brandon Sanderson has built a career on this exact principle, and it works because limits generate plot, while unlimited power only generates convenience.
You Have Enough Structure to Start Moving
The inciting incident, the midpoint, the crisis, the climax. A sentence each is enough. You are not writing an outline here, you are building a set of tentpoles to walk toward.
First or third, past or present -- the choice matters less than the fact that you made it deliberately instead of drifting into whatever felt easiest on page one and regretting it on page ninety.
Every project produces stray ideas, cut scenes, and research you are not ready for. Decide now where those go so they do not clutter the draft or, worse, vanish. A dedicated folder for scraps and notes is the single most useful habit I picked up after that six-week stall.
The Practical Setup Is Handled
Five hundred words a day, not three thousand, if three thousand is not true for you. The architect Frank Gehry has talked about starting builds without a finished blueprint, trusting the process to reveal the rest -- but even he commits to a schedule before the first beam goes up. Commit to yours.
One clear location, synced or backed up automatically. Losing a chapter to a crashed laptop is a solvable problem that too many writers solve the hard way, exactly once.
None of this needs to take more than an afternoon. It is not a substitute for the discovery that happens inside the actual writing -- Lamott is still right that you cannot think your way to a finished book, you have to write your way there. But an afternoon spent here is the difference between discovering your novel and losing six weeks to a brother whose name kept changing. If you want a deeper pass at the turning points once your premise holds up, a separate post on setting up a novel project covers the folder structure that keeps early drafts from turning into clutter, and our guide to outlining methods will take you from these tentpoles to a full outline if that is the kind of writer you are.
Do your pre-writing in Plotiar. Character sheets, a scraps folder for stray ideas, and a flowchart for your turning points, all in the same workspace as the manuscript you are about to start. Try it free.