NaNoWriMo — 5 Useful Tips
NaNoWriMo can be challenging, but some tips can help you get to the bottom and reach your goal.
This article is the English version; if you are interested in the Italian version, you can find it here: NaNoWriMo — 5 Consigli Utili
If you don’t know what is NaNoWriMo, first read the previous article:
I state that this year will be the first NaNoWriMo in which I will participate, but I have documented myself to prepare myself as best as possible.
Here are the five most important tips I have collected:
1. Remember the goals
Remember (or know) that you have two simple goals (and a half):
- The final one (to be reached by November 30th): write 50,000 words; you don’t need a book ready for publication but a draft (obviously, they must not be random words). After the event, there will be plenty of time to review what is written, correct it, and improve it.
- The daily one (to be reached every day in November): write at least 1667 words every day (and update the NaNoWriMo website with the number of words written during the day, if you are registered).
the “half” is the following:
- The preliminary one ( before November): I indicated it as “half” as it depends on your attitude if you like to plan what you want to write or if you are more instinctive. Planning will serve to have a lead to follow in November.
When the main event begins, it will be better to focus on the daily goal and respect it as much as possible (possibly moving forward if you are more in the right mood to write, balancing any negative moments or other commitments). In this way, you will easily reach the final goal as well.
Every long journey begins with a first step.
Lao Tzu
2. Subscribe
Subscribe to the official website of the project, it is not essential, and you could also decide to write independently from the site / competition, but registering on the site is the first step to take this commitment more seriously, and you can also take advantage of numerous opportunities given by the project site itself:
- You will be able to subscribe to regional groups.
- You will be able to look for writing companions to encourage you during the project; as indicated on the project dashboard, you are three times more likely to complete your short story if you have a writing partner.
- There are badges based on the goals achieved; they are also an extra stimulus to write (they are moral).
And join the regional group, will be of enormous help. I have recently joined the Italian group, and I am convinced that thanks to them, I will be able to reach the final goal. You can get more information on regional groups and how to join after registering on the official website of the project.
3. Prepare
This advice varies from participant to participant based on their nature, for example, seeing at the event’s tweet https://twitter.com/NaNoWriMo/status/1299061200701906945 — the majority plan/structure at least part of their story.
Prepare some useful material as inspiration for the event, for example:
- Character sketches,
- chapters you want to write,
- ideas for the plot,
- and anything else that comes into your head that could help.
In this way, you will be able to proceed much more quickly, and in case you have moments where you do not know how to proceed by looking at what is prepared, it can be of a lot of help and unlock you.
For this advice, outliners or mind maps may be useful.
There are also official project resources that can help — https://nanowrimo.org/nano-prep-101.
Furthermore, if you know English fairly well (this article was initially born in Italian) to get some inspiration, you could also use the sites to generate random ideas of various kinds. I don’t use one in particular but just search for “random story generator” to get some results that can be useful.
4. Manage your time
To write 1667 words each day can take a long time depending on your skill and habit; on average, it could take anywhere from an hour to two per day.
It is a huge commitment that we need to write every time we have this opportunity.
Therefore it is essential to manage the time available, and this can be done in various ways and with various methodologies.
An alarm clock (or related smartphone app) or even a kitchen timer can be useful to use as a daily habit of dedicating a window of time to writing without possible interruption.
A useful technique could also be that of the Pomodoro:
https://francescocirillo.com/products/the-pomodoro-t\echnique-book-it-edition
Very briefly, it consists of using a kitchen timer (or equivalent, many apps support this technique directly or indirectly) to alternating intervals of 25 minutes, in which you work concentrated on the single activity (in this case writing), with intervals of 5 minutes, in which you rest.
5. Write
Last but not least, write when you can, planning is important, but the unexpected is always there, for this reason, whenever you can write, for example, there are those people who go running early in the morning or go to the gym before going to work, well, in this case, your gym is just writing so do it as soon as you have some free time, before going to work, on lunch break or maybe even on public transport if you use them for your travels, take advantage of every opportunity to carry on.
Write wherever you have inspiration; you don’t have to be at your desk to write; you can write on a pad of paper that you will then transcribe or on your smartphone (as I did for the draft of this article).
Depending on how you feel better, you can use pen and paper or various computer or smartphone programs.
In the next article, I will briefly introduce several tools that may be useful (and if you are reading this article you should). ;-)
Thanks for reading; if you liked this article (or even if you didn’t like it) or if you have any thoughts on it, let me know in the comments.
