Hey There Friends!
Happy NaNoWriMo!
For much of the world, the holidays kick off with Halloween. October is a month of gearing up for ghouls with slasher flicks and trash amounts of junk candy. For a small number, however, the autumn holidays start out on October first with a mix of fear, trepidation, and vomitous excitement. So, maybe it doesn’t look so different after all.
If you don’t know, NaNoWriMo is a 30-day challenge done annually by novelists around the world. The challenge is to write 50,000 words, an entirely achievable goal, if incredibly difficult to some. We WriMos do this by making the time every day to write 1,667 words. This can look different for every person; some block out hours, while others find little bits of time in their busy human schedules to knock out a couple hundred words at a time.
October kicks of the official NaNoWriMo season, unofficially (but also recently officially) deemed Preptober. Millions of people around the world start dreaming about their book and what they want it to look like. It’s when we start to actively think about the plot, characters, tropes, and all the little things that make it fun. Some do deep dives into structure and plot the entire thing (scenes included) before November 1st. Some simply have a vague idea of what they want it to look like. Many of us are actually in the middle of other projects and feverishly working to finish them before the first- see this week’s YouTube vlog.
Regardless of your level of preparing beforehand, there are a few things that you can do in November that will make the month a success.
Define success for yourself first. Yes, the challenge is to write 50,000 words. However, it might not be enough to have 50K on the page for you. For instance, I’ve won NaNo 3 times I think (definitely two though) and was completely unsatisfied with the projects I wrote. I felt that they weren’t good enough and didn’t tell the story the way I envisioned it. I now know that it’s because I’m a plotter and I need to know a lot more about the story than I did before. So, those NaNos’ weren’t successful for me. Success could also be the community gained more than the words written. There are so many places to find a writing community from YouTube and writing sprints to the NaNoWriMo website to Discord. Regardless, whatever your chosen level of success, make sure you know what that actually looks like for you.
Know when you’re going to write. I’m a night writer by necessity, but I prefer writing in the morning. I can block out two ish hours at night to get in the necessary word count, but I also plan on writing my novel by hand, so I won’t be stuck to the computer the whole time. I can write in the little pockets of time while I’m cooking dinner or picking up the kids from school. (By the way, a successful NaNo for me will be finishing the novel, but the number goal I’m going for that might roughly equate to a NaNo month- and what I feel is most in line with the spirit of the challenge- is approx. 5 pages front and back.)
Plan and prep dinners beforehand. Eliminate the decision fatigue by deciding on a meal plan and sticking to it (you can also do this with your wardrobe, and many other facets of your life).
Get support from your partner or a friend. This can especially come in handy when you have a horde of tiny monsters under foot (*cough*), but it’s not the only support us writers need. External validation is always nice, but the biggest support is forcibly tying us to a chair and putting the pen in our hand. Pens always work. We can’t help but start to churn things out, Misery style.
Just. Start. Writing. Did you know that only 14 out of 100 people finished the NaNoWriMo challenge last year? Yeah. Out of the 250,000 people signed up on the NaNo site, only 33,000 of them actually put pen to paper, so to speak, and didn’t look back. In fact, one of the biggest differences between successful authors and unsuccessful ones are that the successful ones have completed projects. I often get bogged down with the fact that there are so many terrible writers out there finding wild amounts of success, but there’s one thing that they’re really good at (that I often fail at), and that’s doing the dang thing. So, are you one of the 86? Or are you one of the 14?
I, for one, am hopefully optimistic about this year’s challenge, even if (probably especially because) I’ve decided to do it my own way- the one that sticks true to the spirit of the challenge.
Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? I’d love to hear all about it! Until next time, Keep Writing Forward!
-Anna
