Tips and Tech for Tackling NaNoWriMo in the Classroom

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a month-long writing challenge held every November. Starting November 1, over the course of 30 days, participants attempt to write a 50,000-word novel, breaking the project down into daily writing goals of 1,667 words. The event has been going for 20 years strong.

Writers sign up for many reasons: to finally write that novel they’ve been dreaming of, to make a daily habit of writing or to participate in the writing community that springs up around the event. These benefits, with the side effects of improving writing skills and working on grit, can be invaluable to students, particularly those in the English language arts (ELA).

Some educators have found NaNoWriMo to be a great way to get students involved with and excited about writing. NaNoWriMo even has a school- and education-focused program called the Young Writers Program for K–12 students. They provide materials to help facilitate the incorporation of NaNoWriMo into the curriculum, offering a classroom kit to get things moving with setup and implementation as well as lessons aligned to Common Core.

Whether you’re doing a full NaNoWriMo event in your classroom or just incorporating fiction-writing exercises into your lessons, here are some tips and tech that your students — or you — might find helpful throughout your NaNoWriJo (National Novel Writing Journey!).

Brainstorming

All fiction writing starts with an idea — or a whole bunch of ideas, all mixed together like stew in a pot. Coming up with ideas can be difficult if your students are feeling stuck. Creativity sometimes involves looking at things from an oblique angle, or thinking things through from a problem-solving mindset.

Students can try using plot and idea generators, as with these ones on the Writing Exercises website. They can take the prompts and incorporate them into ongoing plots or new scenes. If you want to incorporate STEM into your lessons or you’re teaching a coding class, you could even have students create their own random prompt generators, creating word lists suitable to their genre.

If your class is being taught in a physical space — that is, not an online class — then brainstorming games can help get students’ creativity flowing. Rory’s Story Cubes are dice with pictograms (though they may be a little hard to find, as they are now out of print). Students can roll the dice to come up with stories or plot threads. Ordinary playing cards can also be used to procedurally generate story elements if you assign ideas to suits and values. (You could even use this to kickstart discussion on procedural generation and how it ties into computational thinking.)

Another way to fight writer’s block is for students to take ideas and do deeper research on them, using the facts and information they discover to inform the plot. For example, if they look up information on Martian space travel, what kind of sci-fi plot can they dream up? Wolfram|Alpha is one place to look for stats and general research.

Outlining and World-Building

Particularly for writers who work best with a general idea of their story’s plot, outlines are helpful for keeping writing focused and on track. Outlining can be anything from writing out general to-do lists of scenes to creating massive world-building guides detailing timelines, in-world recent history and more. For students looking to create timelines, Visme is a free timeline-building tool.

Students can use digital notebooks to sort and track information. Web-clipping and note-taking tools like Evernote and Pocket can also help keep things organized, with students using tags to sort the information they find. Any sort of visually based program can be used to track information, from private Pinterest mood boards to personal wikis to bare-bones Google docs. Some writers use Trello boards to drag and drop plot elements around. Check out this list of ways to use Trello for writing!

Scrivener, a program created by one of NaNoWriMo’s sponsors, is a tool that helps to sort and track information in folders, also with a personal tagging system. It allows students to write scenes, then combine them later. It also has virtual “index cards” to help sort the plot, allowing for more flexible outlining. They offer a special trial for Wrimos, those participating in NaNoWriMo.

Writing

Every author has a different writing setup that they prefer. Some like to write using Mac-based tools with streamlined word processing. Others prefer using web-based processors, like Google Docs. One author outlined their process for writing on their smartphone. Scrivener, mentioned previously, doubles as an outlining tool and a word processor.

For classrooms, it’s likely that a student’s choice of word processor will be predetermined by the technical setup of the school itself. In Windows-based schools, such as schools that use Office 365, students will likely use Microsoft Office, while Chromebook schools will rely on Google Docs. Encourage students to back up their work or save to the cloud frequently in order to avoid losing any of their writing. Especially once NaNoWriMo nears its end, students will have large word counts, making file loss all the more tragic!

Students, particularly those in one-to-one schools, may enjoy dictating their stories with speech-to-text tools. The built-in tool for Google Docs is decent, for example, and it can be installed on iPads with the Gboard app. For students with motor disabilities, this sort of adaptive option allows them to participate in NaNoWriMo without strain, making assignments more accessible.

Focusing

It can be hard to stay focused on a task as big as writing a whole novel, regardless of age! Students may find it challenging to keep on track, especially if they don’t have an outline to give them an idea of what to write. Motivational games and focusing apps can help.

For fun, rewards-based writing, try Written? Kitten!, an online word processor that shows a cute photo whenever you hit a word count goal. For students who prefer to live on the edge, Write or Die forces students to write quickly — no edits — lest they face consequences such as blaring alarms or words being erased. Writing is timed, so it’s done as a sprint to keep a high level of focus for a short period of time.

Mood music and sounds can help to keep students focused on the task at hand — or help them work through a tricky scene. For example, a student who can’t seem to write their epic dragon battle might find that playing a few tracks from Spotify or 8tracks helps them get excited about writing.

But not everyone wants music when they write. Noisli, which allows students to program soundscapes for environments such as a quiet campfire with crickets and a gently blowing breeze, can be helpful. It even generates white noise. For those who like to write from Starbucks, Coffitivity creates a coffeeshop ambience from within a web browser.

Further Resources

For examples of teachers who’ve incorporated NaNoWriMo into their classrooms before, check out these blog posts:

• This post on the Share My Lesson blog, which explains how “[s]tudents who were once terrified of writing, seeing it as their weakness, reframe their writing identities as they accomplish goals they could never before imagine.”
• This intro to the Young Writers Program on the Publishers Weekly blog.
• This post from Demco with ideas for NaNoWriMo activities, even in mid-November.
• This portfolio post on Teachable Moments, which shows how a classroom NaNoWriMo project builds community.

By far, one of the best resources for incorporating this project into your classroom is the NaNoWriMo Classroom, a site with class agendas, lesson plans, student testimonials and more. In addition to the main Young Writers Program, this site can be a resource for smaller, more one-off projects using NaNoWriMo.

About the blogger:

Jesika Brooks

Jesika Brooks is an editor and bookworm with a Master of Library and Information Science degree. She works in the field of higher education as an educational technology librarian, assisting with everything from setting up Learning Management Systems to teaching students how to use edtech tools. A lifelong learner herself, she has always been fascinated by the intersection of education and technology. She edits the Tech-Based Teaching blog (and always wants to hear from new voices!).