Advice, Guide, Tips

Version History

1.2 - 2008 October 10th - Added serious Name Generator
1.1 - 2008 October 9th - Added Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Generator
1.0 - 2008 October 5th - Initial release. As it were.

Table of Contents

The Problem
NaNoWriMo Do’s and Don’t Do’s
Preparing for NaNoWriMo
NaNoWriMo Utilities and Links

The Problem

How do you write 50,000 words in 30 days? Why, 1,667 words a day of course. And yet 1.6k a day is nothing to sneeze at; that’s basically Elizabeth Bear writing speed, and she publishes novels and other stuff at an insane rate.

Let’s not ignore the fact that 1.6k a day is actually not an insignificant amount of words (most blog posts come in at 500 words, after all), and look at what we can do to mitigate this situation.

NaNoWriMo Do’s and Don’t Do’s

1. DO set aside some time every day to write. This is vital to winning NaNoWriMo. Once you fall behind, it’s difficult to make up the difference—you’ve lost momentum and you have to make it up, a bad combination.

2. DON’T set aside too little or too much time every day to write. Set aside too little, and you might not be able to make your daily count—another kind of demotivation, one of perceived failure. Set aside too much time, and you’ll miss out on doing what you need to do around the house, family, life.

   How to tell how much time you’ll need? We’ll have a writing speed test in the next section.

3. DO walk into NaNoWriMo with a plan. Every writer has a different thinking and working process; some writers outline, some don’t. The problem with November is that you have a limited time to write a lot of words and a big, nebulous story. An outline of some kind is strongly recommended, even if you don’t usually need one or use one.

4. DO NOT be fooled into thinking you’re going to write great words. There will be many times in November when you’ll look at what you’ve written and think: this sucks, and be tempted to stop or, worse, rewrite what you’ve written. In either case, you lose momentum. Much as I hate to say it, November’s not about quality, it’s about finishing. There’s other months for polish, but you have to finish first.

5. DO prepare a writing area for yourself. Writers are often tempted into thinking they can’t write anywhere but one place, which is not a great thing. However, this is November: having a designated area to sit in every night will help get your mind into the write right place. (Especially an area you can declare VERBOTEN to your family and which doesn’t have a phone or other distractions.)

   There’s no right or wrong designated area. Kitchens are surprisingly peaceful after dinner has been cleared away, for example. Beds and couches are as legitimate (I write in bed) as desks and tables—basically, whatever works for you.

6. DO NOT panic when strange things happen in your writing. There will be times when the plot heads off for you don’t know what-where. There will be times when your characters refuse to do anything. There will even be times when you don’t feel like writing anything. Regardless, don’t stop, don’t lose momentum; write something, write anything.

   When (not if) you find yourself in this position, realize that this is not time for sanity, but a time for crazy. Have your characters order pizza, or talk about what actors they’d like to play them, or stick in Charlton Heston (you’ll need to take him out later of course). Even jump forwards—or backwards—since there’s nothing that says you must write everything in order. Do anything except stop.

   And take heart: sometimes crazy stuff does actually make it into the final work, or helps you discover who your characters are (or have become), or kick out nuances in your theme that you didn’t know you had. Writing is funny like that.

7. DO make sure you are properly hydrated and have eaten good meals and slept. Motherly advice, yes, but mothers can be full of wisdom. A brain half-empty is not going to be a working brain. So have water at your writing area, not too close to your computer or pad of paper (water, not pop or coffee, though you can have those in addition). Have snacks there, too, emergency carbs that aren’t too greasy. And if you’re going to fall over, go fall over properly in bed.

8. DO NOT stop your life just for NaNoWriMo. This is a nasty way to get all insular. Sometimes writers do shut themselves off to write, and if you haven’t got a job, haven’t got a young family, and are naturally a loner, this might help. Unfortunately, most people don’t qualify unless they’re writing professionally already. So be a part of life—do whatever it takes to finish your words for the day and rejoin it.

   And many times what you do in life can provide spontaneous inspiration for your writing; it’s the best fuel and the easiest to obtain. So why not take advantage of it?

   A sort of .5 tip: writing at work is a great way to get fired. Try not to do it (the “writing at work” and also the “get fired” bits).

9. DO have a word war with someone else OR Joe Par. Competition can be a great motivator because it gives you a moving goal—or it can be a great demotivator if you’re running against someone who produces 8000 words a day. For some of us who eat competition for breakfast, this is a perfect motivator.

   But if you’re not a natural competitor, you can still have a moving goal. Just do what golf does—play against par. In this case, pretend that there’s someone who will progressively add 1,667 words every day no matter what, and work on beating Joe Six-Pack Par. He is inexhaustible but won’t work faster than you can handle, and still give you a good goal. If you beat him by one word everyday, this is a supreme feeling. Even if that word is “the.”

10. DO remember that you can do this. If you can’t do this, you would never have thought about doing it in the first place. It’s that simple. You have to imagine that you can do something in order to do it at all—and NaNoWriMo is no different.

Preparing for NaNoWriMo

Few of us would enter an endurance run without doing some preparation first. Maybe we run around the block a little bit more than we used to. Maybe we invest in some shoes that will actually be good in a marathon and give ourselves time to break them in. Maybe we find inspiring quotes and think them while we run. Stuff like that.

NaNoWriMo is also an endurance run. Fortunately it stretches over 30 days so it’s more like running a mile a day rather than 30 miles all in one. Still, it pays to be prepared.

To that end, here’s some useful NaNoWriMo preparation techniques.

Sign Up for NaNoWriMo to Get Pep Talk Emails

“Sign Up at the NaNoWriMo official site!” sounds like Homer Simpson-level duh but it’s actually not quite so. Maybe more like Forrest Gump duh. Signing up will get you a really neat bonus: emails from published authors with advice and encouragement.

I tell you, Neil Gaiman’s email last year was the only thing that kept me going at times.

The Certificate to Write Badly

Here’s a certificate, in PDF, very official, to write badly.

Print it out, put your name on it, and put it somewhere you can look up at when you’re in the throes of despair.

You have permission to write badly. Just finish.

This link is from the very long running thread on Absolute Write, Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, which is full of awesome. Then again, Long Thread is Long, so here’s a handy index to the most salient Uncle Jim posts.

Planning Your Book

This is not the outlining you did in English/Literature class, which is a dry and boring sequence of plot events. This is outlining that tells a story—with character development, dialogue beats, and all that.

There are writing books you can buy, but they may or may not help (some argue that they don’t). If you know me, this is not my usual stance. That’s because there’s not all that much time between here and November.

Personally, I think that Lazette Gifford’s NaNo for the New and Insane is a more or less complete guide for planning out your NaNoWriMo book. She also has great advice for all the other aspects of NaNoWriMo, like blocking out time, and some humorous pieces towards the end. Indeed, the New and Insane book is all I read before NaNoWriMo last year.

The Writing Speed Test

Okay, this is not a competition thing. It’s a yardstick thing. This is a way to measure how quickly you can write the daily allotment of 1,667 words with some exertion and purpose and yet without braining yourself.

What this test does is quite simple: I give you a short scene outline—read the New and Insane book mentioned above to get an idea of what it covers and looks like—and you write 1,667 words using it. Time yourself until you finish, and that, give or take 15 minutes, is how much time you should give yourself to write every day.

Remember: treat it as though this were November. And also give whatever physical characteristics, personality quirks, and whatnot to the characters, location, point of view, etc. Let your imagination run wild, because imagination is November’s fuel.

And remember: Permission to Write Badly Granted; just reach 1,667.

Find a Word Processing Program You Like

It’s October, so now is the time to play around with demos or free software, even get signed up for and try out Google Docs and its only real competitor, Zoho.

I personally use Scrivener, but that may be overkill for you. All you need is something that

1. You can type in
2. Saves your stuff somewhere, even if that’s online
3. Can do “Save As”
4. Can count words, although there’s various word counting things out there so it’s not a strict requirement—just a nice thing to have.

Get 3×5 Cards (1 Pack, < $3)

Do not spend too much money on a pack of 3×5 index cards. Lined is nice, colors are not necessary, and you may also want something to hold them in, plus a pencil that needs no sharpening or a non-expensive pen.

Take these around with you, and use them for outlining your scenes in your spare time. Commutes and/or traffic jams, restaurants, waiting for your Tivo to buffer enough Real Show so you can skip past the commercials, etc.

I suggest index cards because you can rearrange them however you want, and if you mess up one side, you can cross it out and use the other; they’re thick enough for that. Plus a 3×5 pack is very small. If you’re in school you can claim it’s for a project. And they’re usually on sale because school has started.

NaNoWriMo Utilities and Links

Some of which have been covered earlier, but are replicated down here again for your enjoyment.

These links will not open in new windows.

Sections:

The Official Site, Of Course
Word Count Widgets and Meters and Thingies
Progress Tracking
Actually Counting Your Words
Word Processing Programs
Pep Talks!
Ceritficate: Permission to Write Badly
NaNoWriMo and Writing Advice and Experiences
Generators of All Sorts
Interesting Writing Blogs
NaNoWriMo Updates

The Official Site, Of Course

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Donate! Forums! Blogs! Wordcounts! Word wars! NaNoWriMo buddies! Etc.! It’s the official site, of course.

Word Count Widgets and Meters and Thingies

Lots of people like to have a word count meter they can have in their forum signature, or posted on their blog’s sidebar, or indeed in every NaNoWriMo update blog post they may make.

There are the Official NaNoWriMo Word Count Widgets, but there’s also a host of other word count meters out there; I compared six of them.

Additionally, which I didn’t note in my original article, the Curious Device progress bar generator can be saved to your computer and used offline. It also now has options now to modify the look, font, etc. And it still doesn’t rely on images; in other words, it’s pretty much proof against falling over, as so many word counters and meters do in November.

Progress Tracking

Simon Haynes’ progress forms, including a weekend make-up form!

NCES Kids Create a Graph, which will actually keep your graph settings around so you can edit them (just have it send an email to you with your graph in the Save tab, and it has a link you can use to visit your graph again and again). It’s what I used in November ‘07.

Actually Counting Your Words

You may not have access to something that will count your words for you. NaNoWriMo has a word counting script that will show up, but only in the later weeks of November.

Here’s Writertopia’s Wordcounter. It’s Javascript, so it runs in your browser and doesn’t upload your words to anywhere. Yay!

You can also, like with the Curious Device progress meter, save this page to disk and then use it offline.

Word Processing Programs

There’s actually quite a lot of snake oil programs for writers out there; pay $259, get something you could get for less than $40—or free.

Free from organizations:

• Google Documents
• Zoho Online Office Suite
• Open Office

Free from individuals:

• yWriter (Windows), from Simon Haynes
• Jer’s Novel Writer, v 1.1.4 (Mac), from Jerry Seeger

$25

• CopyWrite (Mac)

$30

• Jer’s Novel Writer, latest and greatest version (Mac), from Jerry Seeger

$40

• Scrivener, (Mac) agreed by many to be the best tool for writer-writers out there

Pep Talks!

Here’s Neil Gaiman’s NaNoWriMo 2007 email, which is generally agreed upon by the Internets to be the most awesome of the pep talk emails from last year.

All the author pep talk emails from 2007.

The authors signed up for the 2008 NaNoWriMo pep talk emails.

Certificate: Permission to Write Badly

This is a pretty hard link to find, so here’s the Certificate again for good measure.

NaNoWriMo and Writing Advice and Experiences

Informative, yet not too long to be useful between October to November. Eat in bites.

Lazette Gifford’s NaNo for the New and Insane

From Simon Haynes, the author of the Hal Spacejock series, who also NaNo’s on a yearly basis:

• How to Plot Your Novel
• How to Write a Novel
• How to Beat Writer’s Block

The handy index to the most salient Learn Writing with Uncle Jim posts

“Stories We’ve Seen Too Much Of”: Editors at Various Places

• Strange Horizons, SF/F
• Strange Horizons again, this time for Horror
• Thrilling Detective, Mystery

Generators of All Sorts

Mostly in fun, but inspiration comes from the strangest of places.

Random Plot Generator (based on the Overlord lists)

They Fight Crime!

The Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator

Behind the Name’s Name Generator (does cultures, nations, and other stuff; masculine vs feminine; etc. Serious resource.)

Serendipity: Generators of All Types (names, plot twists, titles, etc)

Seventh Sanctum: Even more generators, many genre-specific

Interesting Writing Blogs

Perhaps a little strange to propose for daily reading for writers, since over half of the above are not geared towards generating direct writing advice, but ah well.

Romancing the Blog (more than just romance!)

Storytellersunplugged (advice from published writers!)

they must need bears (Elizabeth Bear!)

Neil Gaiman’s Journal (you know!)

NaNoWriMo Updates

NaNoWriMo’s Twitter is less likely to fall over under load than the NaNoWriMo blog itself.

Twitter is also highly useful for mass communication. Join up (if you haven’t already), follow your friends and have them follow you, and then you can all twitter your word counts at each other November long, without stepping into slower forums and such.

Here’s my Twitter account, where blog updates and random musations from my medicated mind go.