One week until NaNoWriMo!
Are you ready?
Hello, writers!
In just one short week, November will have arrived and we’ll be racking up words toward our daily word count. In your last week of preparation, rest up, get organized, and hydrate :)
If you’re new here, this is the fourth and final installment of pre-NaNo posts, and you may want to go back and take a look at previous entries for some thoughts on defining your own challenge, articulating what sort of book you want to write, brainstorming scenes, and getting to know your main characters.
This week, I have a few final thoughts on advance planning that you might want to consider before the challenge begins in earnest.
Get Organized
Now is a great time to take a look at your calendar for November. Whether you use a digital calendar, a bullet journal, a daily or weekly planner journal, take this opportunity to get a bird’s eye view of the month ahead.
Block out any days that you know you can’t write. If you’re having 30 people to your house for Thanksgiving, there will be a few days in there when writing is going to tough. Maybe you have a big project due at work or your spouse or child has a birthday in November. Be honest with yourself. There are going to be days when you will struggle to find the time. Identify them and plan for them now. When you take those days away, how many words a day do you need to write if you’re doing the 50K word challenge?
You may also want to block in time each day for writing. Commit to your calendar! Schedule it in like an important appointment—because it is!
Get Focused
I’m guessing you’ll be typing your NaNo project, although I have known folks to write theirs out longhand. If you find your computer too full of distraction, you might just want to go that route and write it in a notebook. (Side note: To do the word count, you can choose a representative page, count the words on that page, and then do the math by multiplying the number of pages by that word count for a ballpark tally. Close enough!)
If you’re typing, though, it is worth considering what program you’ll be using. You can, of course, type your doc in a simple word processing program like Google Docs or Microsoft Word, but you may find some advantages in novel-writing software like Scrivener and Dabble Writer. For me, both Scrivener and Dabble have been lifesavers for organizing drafts of long projects with many chapters. I find massive Word docs unwieldy and hard to sift through, but the the purpose-built software in Scrivener and Dabble tackles it for me. They have built in word count tools that will track your daily words toward your goal with a deadline in mind to keep you on track and have view options to limit distractions on the screen.
But don’t want until 10/31 to try them out! If you want to use novel-writing software, you should install it and get accustomed to it in the coming week so you are ready to write on 11/1. These programs aren’t free, but if you are serious about devoting yourself to a writing practice, the cost may be worthwhile. They aren’t paying me to say that! These programs work for me and other writer friends, and they may work for you, too :)
For a free option to write without distraction, try Sprinter, a program designed to help writers get their thoughts flowing in 15-minute bursts.
Prepare your own prompts
Many writers rely on writing prompts to push through the daily grind of NaNo. In fact, I’ll be sharing prompts twice a week throughout November to help you along. That said, you can generate your own prompts in advance and have them ready to go when it’s time to write.
I wrote about this last week with the idea of scene cards. Generating a stack of index cards each identifying a plot point that might happen in your story gives you a lot of options without requiring you to lock events into a sequence.
If you made scene cards last week, take a look at what you’ve got. To whatever extent you can, in addition to including the main event on your card, try to fill in some more details:
What is the setting of the event (location, time of day, time of year, etc)?
How much time elapses during this scene? Remember that a scene is a self-contained, continuous unit of story so the amount of time that elapses can be quite small—a few minutes—and probably shouldn’t really be more than a few hours.
What characters are present?
Will the arc of the scene move from positive to negative or from negative to positive?
That final bullet point is really important. As I mentioned, it’s okay—maybe even ideal—to write scenes without worrying about the sequence in which they’ll appear in the novel. One reason is that how you arrange your scenes has a huge impact on whether or not your novel is a page-turner. One simple trick to move toward the page-turner category: Align your scenes so that you have a constant alternation of arcs:
Chapter 1 starts positive and ends negative
Chapter 2 therefore starts negative and ends positive
Chapter 3 therefore starts positive and ends negative
And so on. This roller coaster rhythm hooks readers in like a magic trick!
If you are looking for more concrete help outlining, I highly recommend Save the Cat for Novels.
Final Thoughts
I hope you find some time this week to continue planning and brainstorming your character and plot. Once the frenzy begins, it is hard to step away and take in the big picture, so now is a good time to do that. That said, you don’t have to do any planning at all to take part in NaNo. If you want to dive in on November 1 and see what happens, that’s totally fine! The most important thing is that if your goal is to write more, you make time to write more!
Cheers,
Diane