NaNoWriMo

16.67 Ways to Juice Your Daily NaNoWriMo Word Count

November 5, 2018 By Greer Macallister 10 Comments

The best thing and the worst thing about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is the relentlessness of your daily word count goal. You don’t have to write 1667 words a day, of course, but if you want to get to 50,000 words by the end of the month, you need to hit that average.

Some days that’s tough. Some days it feels well-nigh impossible. So here are 16.67 ways to juice your creative energies and string together some sentences – maybe even a scene – to get you closer to your inevitable NaNo win.

1. Take a bite. Look, your characters have to eat sometime. And what and how we eat can say something about who we are and how we live. Especially in a sci-fi, fantasy or historical fiction manuscript, what your characters eat will help define their world and invite the reader to the table.

2. Sweet dreams. Yes, dreams are absurdly overused in fiction in general as a shortcut to communicating a character’s wants and needs. However! In the deliciously sloppy first-draft world of NaNo, exploring is important. Even if the scene doesn’t make it into a finished manuscript, it might help shake something else loose—for the character or for you.

3. Dressed to the tens. Following on that point, clothes, like food, help set scenes and define worlds. Obviously in a finished book you’re probably not going to lavishly detail every single gown and glove, but if you’re looking at a fresh scene you just wrote, asking yourself what everyone involved is wearing might be a way to add a few sentences. And this month, every sentence counts.

4. Away we go. How are your characters getting from place to place? Don’t be afraid to spend a little time in a car or carriage. If two or more characters are traveling together, maybe a conversation happens on the way. Solo traveler? Maybe your buttoned-up character, in the privacy of her own Prius, likes to crank Nine Inch Nails. You may discover something that comes in handy later. If not, at least you’re keeping those fingers limber.

5. ‘Tis the season. Whether or not you’ve thought about what time of year your story takes place, mentions of weather, holidays, annual events, or other time-stamps can be helpful for your eventual reader… and round out those bare-bones scenes you’re throwing down. You’ll want to know eventually whether your character is yanking on a pair of cut-offs or zipping up her puffy parka. Might as well add that in now and put some words to it.

6. Don’t get to the point. When drafting fast, I often find myself scripting the essential parts of conversations where the action happens and then moving on. But that’s not necessarily how talking happens in the real world. You don’t need to start every phone conversation in your book with “Hello, it’s me.” “Hi. How are you?” In fact, please don’t. But ask whether your characters are actually up for these intense, brisk conversations. Is one of them actively trying notto hear what the other is saying? Might the conversation take a turn in a different direction before it comes back to why it’s there?

7. Same amount of conversation, a little more action. In those same, unnaturally effective conversations, what are your characters doing? Pacing? Staring out the window? Punching the mute button so they can chow down on a hoagie? Rounding these actions out is another technique that you can build out now and pare down later, keeping only the best.

8. Mind the gap. Some NaNo-ers work from an outline and some prefer to let the story unfold organically, but either way, you’re probably leaving something out. Go back over the order of events in your story – is there something missing that the reader should see? Does your story skip from A to C when you should put a little something in there about B? (The answer may be no. That is totally OK. But if there’s a chance that you might need to write a scene for that spot, might as well write it now! Get those words!)

9. Flash back. Not to sound like a broken record – have any of us at this point actually heard a broken record play? Note to self, get new clichés – but while too much backstory can bring a finished manuscript to a halt, it can be an absolute boon at this point in the creative process. Your character’s actions are informed by their past experiences, so if you want to write up one of those experiences as part of your NaNo manuscript, have at it! [Read more…]

Five Reasons Not to do NaNoWriMo

November 3, 2018 By Jo Eberhardt 17 Comments

We’re three days into November. Or, as many of think about it, three days into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

Cathy wrote a great post yesterday about trusting your gut during NaNoWriMo. Today I thought I’d write a post about the reasons you shouldn’t do NaNoWriMo at all.

Now, to be clear, I secretly love NaNo. I’ve done it sporadically over the last couple of decades, and I absolutely love the concept of it. I just think that if you’re doing NaNoWriMo for the wrong reasons, it may do more harm than good. So let’s get into it. Here are the top five reasons you absolutely shouldn’t do NaNoWriMo.

(Note: The first year I participated, I started on the 8th of November, so if you haven’t started yet and you think you’d enjoy the experience, it’s definitely not too late!)

1. Because it will be easier to write my novel when I’m part of a group.

[Read more…]

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How NaNoWriMo Helps Creativity Soar

November 27, 2017 By Julia Munroe Martin

I’m 10,000 feet in the air. I’m in an airplane. I hate to fly, but I’m not paying much attention to that. I’m much more consumed with what’s waiting on my laptop.

Why?

Because NaNoWriMo. I have over 10,000 words to write in the next five days.

Disclaimer: There are strong feelings on both sides about NaNoWriMo. I say that because I’d like you to keep reading regardless of how you feel about it. This post is about writing constraints and creativity and about how sometimes creativity can be forced, but it uses NaNoWriMo to get there.

Meanwhile, I’m still 10,000 feet in the air, but only for another hour. It’s a short hop, Baltimore to Portland, Maine. Only 40 minutes between ascent and descent. The second the captain announces it’s okay to use electronics, I pull out my laptop, feeling pressured, and as my fingers touch the keys, I’m suddenly afraid I can’t produce at all. I mean, I’m already anxious about flying, every air pocket and thermal making me jump. Now I’m anxious about writing, too.

Not the ideal set up.

I read the last sentences I’ve written in my WIP, type some tentative words, then a few more, and after several minutes I’m already feeling freer in my writing. A little while longer and the words flow. In the end, I’ve written about 500 words.

[Read more…]

How Not To NaNoWriMo

November 6, 2017 By Greer Macallister

I’m not a huge fan of rules about writing. I don’t write every day, for starters. I neither write what I know nor do I not write what I don’t know. So there are very few blanket pronouncements I would make about writing, and I would never tell people not to do NaNoWriMo, attempting to knock out the better part of a novel in just one month.

But I will say this: I’ve done it a few times, and sometimes it turns out really well, and sometimes it’s a spectacular crash-and-burn failure, and the difference between the two is never whether I actually manage to get 50,000 words onto the page.

So I have some ideas about what makes you more likely to succeed or more likely to fail. Here are my guidelines for what not to do, and I can tell you exactly what happens to at least one writer who tries to NaNoWriMo (yes, it can be a verb) this way. Because I am that writer.

Don’t just say “any word is a good word.” I recently finished the first draft of my next novel, which I worked on as my NaNoWriMo project two years ago. I’m a sloppy writer and a big advocate of just getting words on the page. So what’s the difference between the 25,000 words I eked out two Novembers ago and the 100,000 draft I just finished? About 90,000 words, for one thing. During that November, I tried writing in different voices, from the POV of different characters, and paid no attention to whether or not all the scenes came together. Accordingly, almost none of them did. I did a great job developing characters… many of whom didn’t even make it into the novel. Part of NaNoWriMo’s usefulness is to get past your inner editor, but I left her so far in the dust that she has pretty much shrugged her shoulders and given up on me. Have some kind of a plan, even if it changes along the way.

Don’t just write because it’s November. Six Novembers ago I had plenty of time on my hands (no kids, a husband busy with business school, and reasonable work hours) but only a kernel of an idea. I didn’t take the time to develop the idea, because – hey, it’s November! Now’s the time! I exceeded the 50,000-word goal well ahead of November 30 and once December came I literally never opened the file again. From what I remember, the protagonist liberally quoted Fiona Apple lyrics and referred to her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend exclusively as “F**king Ruby Bruno.” I’m pretty sure it’s not going to fit into my future publications. I tell people that no writing is wasted because you always learn something from it, but I learned less from that novel than from any of my others. I guess what I learned is, well, don’t just write because it’s November. [Read more…]

The Time It Costs to Write

November 3, 2017 By Natalia Sylvester

The most common question I’m asked about my books is, “How long did it take you to write them?”

The second most common question: “What is your writing routine like?”

I usually hesitate to answer either of these questions because I suspect they’re another way for a writer to compare him or herself to others, which is never helpful. Sure, there are probably tips and insights to be gleaned from learning that it took me nearly seven years and countless revisions and rewrites to finish my first book, or that I often go months without writing at all, and then spend months writing daily…

But that’s just me.

And I know that really, at the heart of this question is an unspoken plea for the answer we all seek: how do you find the time? On the flip side of that plea is a guilt and almost-shame of not having (or making) the same amount of time as other (perceived) successful writers. [Read more…]

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