NaNoWriMo starts in less than two days!
I thought I’d come up with some tips for NaNo success, based on my experiences (this is my fifth year doing NaNo and the only year I didn’t win was my first). There are no dirty tricks or cheating here, just advice on how to get to 50,000 words the legitimate way. Many of them you’ve probably heard before (there’s a reason for that: they’re usually good advice!), but hopefully these are helpful to someone.
*Disclaimer: I’ve tried to make these general enough to apply to a wide range of writing habits, so that they’re not just a list of things that only work if you write like me. But as always, your mileage may vary*
1. Write every day. Everyone gives this piece of advice, but I’m giving it again and putting it first because it really is the most important and can’t be emphasized enough. When you break it down, 1667 words per day isn’t a lot. One day you really won’t feel like writing for whatever reason: you’re unmotivated, your muse absconded with your plot, you’d rather watch a rerun of a movie you’ve seen a hundred times. You’ll tell yourself that it’s not a big deal because it’s just 1667 words and it’ll be easy to add that on to tomorrow’s count. DO NOT FALL INTO THIS TRAP. 90% of the secret to a successful NaNo is perseverance and the rhythm that comes from making yourself write every day. If you break that rhythm it can be very difficult to find it again, and before you know it’s been a week since you wrote and you’re 15,000 words behind. So again: write every day.
2. You will not write every day. It happens. One day you’ll have a better excuse than a burning desire to rewatch Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets. You’ll have a nasty cold and a burning desire to sleep. You’ll have a big school or work project due. Your family will demand that you spend an evening with them. That’s fine. Don’t panic. Don’t think you’re going to fail NaNo because you miss a day here and there. I’ve never made it through a NaNo where I managed to write every day. Just assume you’re going to miss at least 2-3 days during November. What you shouldn’t do is PLAN for them. Don’t set aside a day and say, “That’s a day I’m not going to write,” because you’re going to want that day back when you have an actual reason for not being able to write. For the same reason, when you have lazy days don’t tell yourself that you can get away with not writing. See Tip #1.
3. NaNoWriMo is part of your life in November. Yeah, you’re busy. You have a schedule to balance, and things like work and school are more important than NaNo. But schedule in NaNo just as you would anything else. Plan an hour each day to sit down and write. Write for that whole hour and don’t do anything else. It doesn’t matter where the hour comes from. Go to bed an hour later. Get up an hour earlier. Spend one less hour watching TV. It doesn’t even have to come all at once: you could have two half-hour sessions or four fifteen-minute sessions (though I recommend writing at least half an hour at a time because any less than that and your writing period is over before you’ve really gotten into it). After an hour, you’ll probably have close to the amount of words you need for that day.
4. When it comes to planning, take your cue from how you normally write. If you don’t usually make detailed outlines, character sketches, and extensive notes before you start writing, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you have to plot out your whole novel just because a lot of other people are doing it. You don’t want to get burned out on a story idea before you even start. On the flip side, if you’re a writer who usually outlines and doesn’t do well with “by the seat of your pants”-style, then it would probably be a good idea to do what you need to do so you don’t find yourself flailing come November. And if you are writing from an outline, no matter how detailed, don’t be afraid to leave it in the dust. If the writing starts feeling like a chore then do something to change it up. Otherwise you’re going to start dreading the writing process, and then you’ll procrastinate, and then you’ll lose NaNo.
5. Don’t edit. Don’t even read back through what you’ve already written, unless it’s just a little bit to remember where you left off last session. Reading back over will only depress you and make you want to fix everything you see wrong. Don’t. Other NaNoers are not going to judge you for not having perfect, sparkling prose, because everyone is in the same boat. What you should be coming out with at the end of NaNo is 50,000 words of a very rough draft. You should not be coming out with 2,000 perfectly-crafted words. If you’re writing a novel that you want to finish, the former is going to be a lot more useful than the latter. Once November is over you can take your time editing until you have 50,000 perfectly-crafted words. Then you’ll have a novel instead of just a couple of beginning chapters.
6. Do occasionally throw your inner editor a bone. This goes against the advice a lot of other people would give, but this is from my personal experience. If you make a typo and catch it immediately, correct it. If that sentence you just wrote is complete garbage, rewrite it. Fixing small mistakes that you catch right away isn’t going to slow you down that much, and it’ll probably save your perfectionist side a lot of grief and anguish and guilt. But look at what I wrote there: “fixing small mistakes that you catch right away.” That doesn’t mean reading back over stuff you wrote days ago so that you can fix the grammar. That doesn’t mean agonizing for hours over how to make sense of that garbage sentence. If you catch something as you’re writing it and immediately know how you want to fix/reword it, then do it. Otherwise move on.
7. Start strong, because you’re probably not going to finish strong. You’re going to have a lot of enthusiasm ready to go when November 1st comes around, so use it. Don’t write 1667 words the first day and think, “Okay, that’s it, time to close this up until tomorrow.” You’re excited. You’re full of ideas. Take that energy and use it to write, because hey, this is what you’ve been waiting for. It’s here. Do it. And do it the next day and the next and rack up that word count, because the second week is going to suck. And if not then, the third week will. Your energy will flag and you’ll start second-guessing everything you write. You’ll come to the conclusion that you’re a terrible writer and you’ll wonder how insane you had to be to even consider doing this. Having more than the target number of words will be a nice cushion for those middle weeks when you just want to curl up and cry. If on those days you cannot possibly get more than 500 or 1000 words, then you aren’t in as much danger of falling behind if you’re already ahead. But still keep in mind Tip #2: your days off should be for unavoidable circumstances, NOT because you feel lazy or uninspired.
8. Have fun online, but be careful. The best part of NaNo is taking on this crazy project with the support of thousands of other people. I’ve made some great friends through NaNo. It’s awesome. The NaNoWriMo forums themselves are great sources for inspiration, research, friend-making, and cheerleading. Writing is normally such a solitary activity that it’s not surprising so many people get energized from the social aspects of NaNo. It’s new and different and fun, and it’s only for a month, so it’s good to take advantage of it. Except…be careful you don’t take so much advantage of it that your writing suffers. Go to the forums, chat to fellow NaNoers, participate in word wars. Do all that if you want. It’s great. But do you remember that hour you set aside way back in Tip #3? Remember the part about not doing anything but write? That means no forums, no chat windows, no LJ, no Facebook or Twitter or anything else. Close it all down. Unplug from the Internet if the temptation is too great. Write for your hour. After that you can browse and chat to your heart’s desire safe in the knowledge that you’ve already written what you wanted for that day. And yes, when I say don’t do online stuff, I’m including word wars. Word wars are great, but aren’t reliably organized. A group of people can get together and do a fifteen-minute word war and then spend two hours just chatting and goofing around. If you’ve already written for an hour that day, great, and hey, you just got even more words with your word war! But if all the writing you end up doing that day is for one fifteen-minute period, and this is a pattern that’s repeated day after day, then you’re not going to end up with much at the end of November.
[...] whole lot of words talking about nothing). So maybe it’ll be all right, as long as I remember my own advice and make myself write every single [...]