Almost Time for NaNo!

It's that time of year again, when thousands of aspiring novelists gather together their hoard of snack foods and energy drinks, find a quiet place, crack their knuckles, and hunker down to hammer out 50,000 words in 30 days.

It's time... for NaNo!

National Novel Writing Month (better known as NaNo or NaNoWriMo) starts promptly at midnight on Halloween night and lasts until midnight on November 30th. At the website, you can sign up to be part of a community of other NaNoers where you can share your trials and tribulations, your successes and breakthroughs, your surprises and wrong turns, and find inspiration and encouragement from hundreds of other writers just like you. It gives people an excuse to write every day, and for those of us who need the extra motivation, a deadline and a daily goal (1667 words a say, if you want to hit 50K on November 30th itself).

I've done NaNo twice before, in 2006 and 2007, and I'm proud to say I won both years. Here are a few things I learned that new NaNoers (and even some veterans) might want to keep in mind:

• Pick a schedule and keep to it. In past years, the schedule that worked out best for me was doing my NaNo-related stuff when I got up. I'd read through the day before's work as I ate breakfast and woke up a little more, then dive in for the next 1667 words. TV stayed off, no checking of email, deviantArt, blogs or forums, and certainly no IMing until I reached my daily goal. After the first week, my family learned to leave me alone during that time, which was a major help right there.


• Keep track of your progress. I made myself a spreadsheet to keep track of mine, including day, how many words I should have, and how many I actually had. If I was ahead of schedule, my actual count was done in green. Red, if I was behind. Kind of the whole "do your homework and get a sticker" idea. It seemed to work for me.


• If the spirit moves you, run with it! If you hit your daily goal and the story's flowing and you don't have anywhere else to be, go with it! Keep writing! Whenever possible, you want to get ahead of schedule. After all, you never know when something's going to come up that'll cut into your writing time. (Thanksgiving and weekends tend to be the big ones for me)


• If it makes your feel better, plot it out. For my first NaNo, I dutifully plotted out my story, convinced that I'd get stuck somewhere along the way and be completely lost and suddenly I'd be 30,000 words behind. I have to say, having it plotted was kind of nice (I used about half the steps of the Snowflake Method for the outline), and it definitely made the whole experience go smoothly. Ideally, this should be done in October, before you start, but you can always take a little time once you get a better idea of where your story's going and do some planning then.


• Winging it's fine, too. Some people like to be surprised, to stick a group of characters together and let them work their own way out. If that's the way you work best, go for it! For my second NaNo, I spent October planning on one story and ended up doing a completely different one on November 1st. Fortunately, it was one I'd been thinking about for awhile, so I had some idea of the characters and major plot points (my preferred way of working - I like to know where I'm going, but have a little room to play along the line).


• This is a first draft. No one, I repeat, no one ever has a perfect first draft. It's okay if your prose is rusty, your analogies cliche, and your dialogue stiff - the whole point is to get something done so you can work with it later!


• Save the editing for December. Or, better yet, give yourself a month off after you finish your manuscript and look at it then. The last thing you want to do in NaNo is get bogged down in endless rewrites. I only ever look back as far as the day before. As I read through, I might do some minor editing and what not, but other than that, it's plowing ahead. I also keep a list of changes I'll want to make after November's done, but that all gets saved until after I've got my 50K nice and secure. Besides, a little distance is a good thing when polishing a piece - it helps you see that what you thought were sparkling gems of wit and beauty are actually worn out and kinda cheesy.


• Visit the forums. Half the fun of NaNo is the community. If you get stuck, need a break, or want some people to commiserate with, the forums are the place to do it! Just remember to get your writing done, too.

Ultimately, this is supposed to be a fun, enjoyable experience. Of course, writers as a group tend to enjoy suffering through the process, so ideas of "fun" may vary. ;)

Here's to a good NaNo, everyone!