How to Start (and Finish) NaNoWriMo Over a Week Late
Your coworkers have been buzzing about it, or at least the two in the corner with their laptops open on their lunch breaks. Today you finally asked them what it is that they keep muttering about. Why they keep tossing numbers back and forth to each other every hour with either triumph or dismay. “6,045!” “Ha, “7,453!”
“It’s NaNoWriMo,” the more precocious one says with a slightly crazed look in their eye.
“National Novel Writing Month,” the other says with a tight lip, typing as they talk.
“You write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November, there’s a website, see?” the precocious one says, turning their computer around to reveal a baby blue site full of graphs and messages, “NaNoWriMo” emblazoned on the top. They show it all to you, talking very fast, how it tracks your progress as you log word count, show you their novel synopsis for this month excitedly, and explain how they just found the perfect working cover to post as part of their project after searching for an hour on a few fair-use picture websites.
“Cool,” you say. Mystery solved. You walk back to your table, thinking about what it must be like to write a novel in a month. A month! No way was that possible to do. How long did it take the author to write your favorite novel? Years, probably.
You start work again, but as you go, after about an hour, you start to think about writing. You always liked it. Took a couple of creative writing courses in college. It was fun. You’d even toyed with writing a novel at one point over a long, boring summer in high school. In fact, you think you still have those first ten pages.
When you get home you spend an hour digging through your computer archives and end up having to call your mom and then having her transfer you to your dad so that he can track down your story on the hard drive of your old home computer. He emails it after fifteen minutes.
You open the file with unexpected excitement. You read the pages. They’re not even bad. The characters feel like old friends you forgot you had.
Your eyes see the word count at the bottom of the page, then, and bug out a little. 3,159 words, about. Holy shit. These fifteen pages took you all summer and all that amounted to less than 10% of 50,000. And yet… You scan the pages again. No, definitely not usable, but you think you remember where this story was going. It was good too, the end.
You realize there’s a smile on your face, an excitement that you haven’t felt in years. You go to the NaNoWriMo website and you stare at it for a while. You look at the date. November 10th. Damn. 1/3 of the way is already over.
Then again if your precocious coworker is only at 6,000 words right now, then you could probably catch up. Yeah. Yeah, you could do that.
A love of storytelling, a voracious reading habit, a penchant for carrying a notebook everywhere. If you have any of these, I would recommend trying NaNoWriMo at least once in your life. I’ve never felt more connected to any story I’ve written, never felt more challenged and rewarded and frustrated. Writing a novel, a full, long novel, is exactly as hard as it seems. Yet, though it seems counter-intuitive, that daunting task is actually made easier with the challenge of NaNoWriMo because you’re given a deadline and a community that is all struggling to make that 1,667 word a day goal (and that’s if you start on time). I’ve done it four times in the past, only succeeding once to hit 50,000, but each time coming out with at least 30,000 words of a story that I hadn’t had before. And I’ve started with the month half over for some of these. Word count is a moving target here that seems to speed up each day, but even if you’re starting today, as long as it’s before November 31st, you can still take the energy and momentum that comes with this challenge and turn it into something you can be proud of.
That being said, if you’re starting late especially, there are a few things that I’ve learned over the years that can make the process of catch-up seem a little less hopeless:
1. Find At Least a Few Big Chunks of Time to Plug In
Busy schedules are the biggest excuse in NaNoWriMo, and for a good reason. Because we are busy! So busy! It seems like everything and everyone but that blank Word document on your screen needs you and needs you now. How can you ever be expected to write 1,667 words a day, plus all the ones that you need to catch up, with everything else that you’re expected to do?
The best way is to write every day, even if it’s only 100 words, and then find a few times a week where you can commit to sitting down and writing for hours at once, where nobody can disturb you or try and pull you in a million different directions. I’ve found that the best way to increase word count is to just plug in and commit. Start with a scene, start with some dialogue, follow a few of the tips below, and you should emerge from your session with at least 3,000 words put away in one sitting, maybe more.
2. Let Yourself Get Lost in Your Story
The easiest way to give up is to feel like you have nothing to write, nothing to say. Your characters are useless and don’t want to do what you told them to do, your villain would rather keep to himself than cause trouble. If you feel like you’re at arms-length from your story, like it’s a 2-D paper doll show, you need to find a way to close that distance and break into your characters’ heads. Don’t write whatever scene you keep getting stuck on. Instead, take your main character and put them in a situation where someone is threatening their life. Make their heart pound. Or give them an affair, give them exactly what they want in life and find out why it’s not enough for them. Or take everything away from them in one scene and see who comes out on the other side.
That scene you write might even be that jump-start to the story that you’ve been looking for. Or that scene might not factor in, but that’s what editing is for later after the month is over. For now, you’ve got another scene and hopefully gained access to your main character’s head, to their desires. Follow that character, make other characters for them to get into fights with, other characters that will take away whatever your character wants. Then you have a story. Better, you have a world in your story that you will want to return to, that you might even look forward to plugging into for a few hours.
3. Don’t Write in Order
There’s no law in NaNoWriMo that you have to write something that makes sense, nor is there even a law that you have to write something that could be considered a book. As long as you have 50,000 words by midnight on November 31st, you’re a winner. So, especially if you have a lot of catch-up to do, don’t wait to write a scene that you’re inspired to write. Just get that down as quickly as you can. Watch the word count increase, all the while thinking about what happens next after that scene, what next confrontation you want to write, what fallout there will be. Think about how you can up the stakes, how you can take even more away from your main character, how you can place more and more obstacles in their path, then write those scenes as well.
4. Take as Many Risks as You Can
Once you get past your inciting incident, once you’ve introduced all your side characters and subplots, odds are that you’re going to hit a wall. Around 15,000 words, maybe as late as 25,000 words you realize that you know where this story goes, you know how it ends, but you just can’t make it there. Why? Because it’s a slog, the effort is weighing on you; all that time you’ve been spending on this, that you’re not using to sleep, is bringing you down. You made the blueprint, and the end’s going to be awesome, but maybe you just don’t have the stuff to finish a book after all.
Except none of the above is the real reason why you can’t get past the wall. The real reason is that you’re bored. Yeah. You planned everything out, but forgot that middle 20,000 words (almost half the book!) doesn’t just go on in your favorite books, but it’s full of action! Full of events! Things happen! You can’t bring yourself to write one more mundane scene because your characters are just doing the same thing over and over again. Nothing’s new, there’s no conflict, and you’re just trying to fill space.
Break out of that. What’s the worst possible thing that could happen to your characters at this moment? Make it happen. Who could come back into town that would destroy the carefully manicured lives you’ve found this rhythm for? Heather? Hurricane Heather has arrived. Or a real hurricane, Hurricane Heather, can arrive. The only way your character can be cleared of the crime they were framed for is through the eyewitness account of Joe Smith? Kill Joe Smith. Don’t be afraid to back your character so far up shit creek that you have no idea how to get them out of it. Why? Because you’ll find a way, and once you find that way, you will have a series of events that will keep both you and your readers on the edges of their seats.
5. Finally, Have as Much Fun as You Can
Taking your story too seriously, taking NaNoWriMo too seriously, can change a wonderful, creative explosion into a second job. The best way to get through this month and look back on it as a positive experience is to use it to stay inspired, to put in the effort to not only get words on the page but to find and follow to the end the story that you’ve always wanted to write. Nobody is making you do this but yourself, and nobody is making you finish but yourself. So don’t stress about quality of writing, and don’t even stress about quantity (too much). Just let it pour out of you. You’ll look back on this month and remember that haze and fervor, remember how connected you were with your characters and your world, and you’ll miss it so much that you’ll want to do it all over again next November.
