*10 NaNoWriMo Tips*
For getting words down. Fast.
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Since it’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and I’m sure many of you are participating, I thought I’d hit pause on questions today (but please, keep them coming!) and share some tips and ideas about how to tackle and dare I say even enjoy the nutty, frustrating, invigorating, satisfying project you’re now about a third of the way through. (For those who are unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo is an organization that provides free community and support for people to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.)
I have posts about How to Write Faster and How To Write on a Deadline, but I wanted this one to be specifically geared toward this month’s endeavor. I’ve never done NaNoWriMo,1 but I have drafted multiple 60K word novels in a four-week period,2 and NaNoWriMo largely aligns with my own writing approach:
Get words down. Quickly. Don’t overthink it. Save the editing for later.
I can’t make a blank page any better. But I can work and rework actual words on that page until they finally start to approach what I want them to be. And until something is written, it’s all hypothetical—all the planning and outlining and perfecting something in my head doesn’t mean anything until I see what words I’ve produced. Those words inevitably take on a life of their own and become something other than that perfect (but nonexistent!) thing I’d once been free to imagine. My writing is an ongoing conversation between the book as I’d pictured it and the actual narrative taking shape on the page.
So step one, for me, is to get out of my own way and see what surprising, fruitful, engaging, interesting, thorny, creative, wild moments can emerge when I (metaphorically) close my eyes and just write.
Tips:
It can help to start with an outline. It doesn’t have to be too detailed, but if you give yourself a sense of where you’re going, you always have something you can check so you know where to go next anytime that you’re stuck.
If you don’t have an outline, or your book has changed, make a new one. Stuck halfway through? Write a new outline for the next section. Can’t work out the next chapter? Jot down some bullet points about what you want the next scene to achieve, and away you go.
No using the delete key. Sure, maybe it’s “cheating” to add to your word count. But I don’t delete very much when drafting. If I’m partway through a scene and realize I’m heading in the wrong direction, I just hit enter a few times and start over again wherever I want to pick up. There may be pieces of that initial scene I’ll keep, or maybe I’ll delete it all. But that’s a problem for a later me to work with. Right now, my job is to write. My first drafts have unfinished sentences, unfinished paragraphs, scenes written three different ways. It doesn’t matter. Keep going.
Remember, no one is going to read this. See, above, my unfinished sentences and the Swiss cheese disaster of my very first drafts. Who cares! No one is reading, judging, or evaluating my writing here. That’s not what this draft is for. This draft has only one job: to exist.
The purpose of this draft is to tell yourself a story. That’s it! It’s not a story with no plot holes, or a story with gorgeous prose, or a story that’ll knock anyone’s socks off. It’s just a story with, loosely, a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a few pivotal moments blocked into place. Because you have to start somewhere. It’s so liberating to not have to be good right off the bat!!!
You can’t write and edit simultaneously. I recently heard an interview with Lauren Groff where she talks about her process, and she said something really smart about how the part of her brain that’s focused on telling the story can’t also devote time and attention to the language itself. So you don’t do both at once. By the time you’ve completely edited and polished a manuscript, you can’t tell anymore at what stage all your moments of brilliance made their way into the story. Some things will have been there from the beginning, but a lot will find its home in your work much later on. But you needed all the messy, early drafts to get there.
The only way out is through. This is always true for writing. There are no secrets and no shortcuts. This sucks, because we’d all like a magic writing wand to make the words come out better the first time around. But it’s also the best part of writing. We’re all able to do it, if only we do it.
Don’t query your NaNo project!!! No, really. Not in December, not in January, not even, probably, at all in 2024. Not after you revise it once, or even after you revise it yet again. Give yourself the full breadth of time and space it takes to turn an idea into a book, a draft into a finished manuscript. You need edits, beta readers, multiple critique partners, and plenty of time to put your manuscript aside and return to it with fresh eyes. Especially if this is your first novel. It will be bad. I’m not insulting you! It’s supposed to be bad! But it will not be ready for prime time. The point of this exercise is to get words down. Whether those are the right words in the right order is, again, a task for later you to tackle.
Appreciate what you’ve accomplished. Even if you don’t “win” NaNo this year, think of the words you’ve written that you didn’t have at the beginning of the month, and that wouldn’t exist if you—yes, you!—hadn’t sat down to write them. As writers we beat ourselves up all the time for what we haven’t done, and take so little time to recognize what we have. There’s such joy in getting to be immersed in a meaningful project and swimming through this process of discovery. I hope you take the time to feel it.
Take what’s useful from this month as you go forward in your writing, and discard what isn’t. There are limitations to focusing so much on word count. It’s easy to pad scenes with total fluff. And sometimes, taking the time to think more first, without writing something down, can make all the difference. But those are things to learn for later, when you aren’t up against this deadline. NaNo is about momentum, not perfection. Embrace it.
Don’t stop! Don’t give up!
Most importantly, keep going.
- Kate
My schedule has never lined up with needing to draft a new novel from scratch at exactly this time—since I spend so much more time editing than I do writing an initial draft—and also I have a rebellious streak where I don’t like doing what everyone else is doing at the same time lol.
My romance writing contracts had 60K novels due every 3 months. I’d spend 4-5 weeks drafting, 4-5 weeks revising, and leave myself 2+ extra weeks built in for life to inevitably get in the way. This wasn’t sustainable for me in the long term, but it did help me build up a practice and an approach to writing where now I do quick first drafts, and then take more time (way more than the 3 month limitations) to devote to revision.