Another year of Nanowrimo is upon us and writing communities around the world are pumped about the stories they’re going to tell the world.
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing.
Chris Baty accidentally founded National Novel Writing Month in 1999, and oversaw the event’s growth from 21 friends to more than 300,000 writers in 90 countries.
On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought about writing a novel.
Join and read how you can participate here: How It Works
Get into the writing spirit:
Writing is all about discipline and sitting yourself down and putting one word after another. You write for the sake of writing.
Some things that would keep your motivation up and that helped me as well are listed below for your benefit:
- Get a writers’ group together and keep each other on track. Meet up and write together. Find your people and set up camp here: Camp Nanowrimo
- Have an Evernote notebook dedicated to writing for nanowrimo and share it with your fellow writers for critique and progress monitoring reasons.
- Set a desktop calendar for writing, which tells you your writing goal of the day. You can find some cool designs here: Nano Calendars 2015
- Use a distraction free writing app. You might find some good tools here: Nanowrimo Tools for Apple Devices
- Stop slacking off and write even if you don’t want to.
Last Minute Tips:
It’s the first of November; the last minute is over, but there are still a few hours to save your day. Take these tips.
1. Pick a time to write and make it a priority. The time to write is now.
2. Gather your resources: Try writing prompts. Explore different styles of writing. The Internet is an amazing thing. Just don’t spend too much time on getting your resources list ready. Also, beware of cute animal videos while doing your research.
3. Take 10-20 minutes – set a timer to keep you focused. Write a list of as many things as you can think of that you could write about. Just one phrase or sentence about each idea.
4. Create a plot sketch with a few disasters.
5. See whom you like to play in your writing. Again, although its inevitable, but try to limit the time you spend on creating characters.
6. Describe your idea in a sentence. Map it out and get started.
I’ll leave you to write with these things:
Fun Read
And finally, from my favorite writer (whom I wish to meet with someday IRL
8 Good Writing Practices (Also by Neil Gaiman)
1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending youve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you somethings wrong or doesnt work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, youre allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But its definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
From an article in The Guardian.
