AKA: “How I Got My Shit Together and Finished NaNoWriMo”
AKA: “How I Won NaNoWriMo with a Full Time Job”
I’ve considered myself a writer for decades. You’ve seen some of my work on this very blog, mostly in the form of short stories and fan-fiction. For better or for worse, though, my writing “white whale” has long been the completion of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. While the NaNoWriMo organization has been mired in controversy for the past several years and does NOT have my support, I can absolutely get behind the idea: hit 50,000 written words in a month, or about 1,667 words a day for 30 days.
I’ve made several attempts to complete NaNoWriMo over the years, all of them unsuccessful. To make matters worse, I regularly fizzled out within the first week or two of these NaNoWriMos, falling on my face and quitting before hitting 10,000 words. It was quite discouraging. I often found myself engaging in self-talk, with phrases like: “if you really wanted this, you’d make time,” running through my mind.
Here’s my truth, though: while mindset was important to my completion of NaNoWriMo this year, it was only one part of a bigger picture. As such, I want to discuss some of the steps I took to finally make my NaNoWriMo goals a reality. Better still, all of these tips and tricks are “free.99,” so feel free to use what works for you and discard the rest.
“NaNoWriMo is a MARATHON, not a SPRINT.”
Writing 1,700 words a day was not something that came naturally to me; I had to work my way up to it. I started by picking a number of words I felt I could write daily with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back. For me, that was 100 words. I never explicitly timed myself, but I found it usually took no more than 15 minutes to get that many words out. Though it was a small step, shooting for a number I found “laughably easy” helped me to build up my writing habit and get out of my own way.
The following month, I increased my word count to 250, then 500, then 1000, then 1700. It took five months of ramping up, but building up that habit meant I went from really celebrating a 1,700 word day during month two (August) to regularly hitting 1,700 words by month five (November). My “best day” was during NaNoWriMo when I hit 4,200 words. While I’m proud of and pleased with that number, my habit and consistency meant I didn’t have to “sprint” to hit my goals.
“Social Media? No thanks.”
Here’s my ‘old woman yells at cloud’ moment for this post: I remember when the internet was a weird and wild place, when websites were wacky and were often passion projects and reflections of their creators rather than soulless corporate time-sucks designed to keep people “engaged” for as long as possible. Despite my general disdain for Social Media, however, I have my vice of choice in the latest iteration of the internet: YouTube. To this day, I still have YouTube open and playing for hours a day, often with music but also with video essays and “content” (bleh) around a mish-mash of other hobbies I’ve collected over the years.
Did I give up YouTube to win NaNoWriMo? Hell no! Having a soundtrack to write to was too helpful to give up. Instead, I downloaded a number of browser extensions that re-configured YouTube to work for me. The two with the biggest impact were “Limit” and “Untrap for YouTube.” The former gave me the ability to set a hard timer for how long I was willing to spend on YouTube any given day. The latter allowed me to nuke shorts from my YouTube homepage and from YouTube’s suggestions below any given video. These two, in combination, have saved me a ridiculous amount of time, and will remain in use for me for the foreseeable future.
“It’s not the tools, it’s the craftsperson.”
First, a disclaimer: I regularly have to remind myself of this. I’ll be the first to tell you that I have spent more money than I’d care to admit on writing software, keyboards, “Writer Decks” (like the FreeWrite Traveler), and the myriad devices that promise to make writing easier, faster, and more fun. In the end, though, my success at NaNoWriMo didn’t come from any of them. Instead, it hinged almost completely on a free program: “FocusWriter.”
Two features in particular were the engine of my NaNoWriMo success: daily goals and streak tracking. I set my daily goal to 2000 words, but set my streak to continue at 1700 words. The result? I didn’t miss a single day of the streak for the entirety of NaNoWriMo. Granted, I didn’t do all of my writing in the program itself; often I copy-pasted from other sources (like Google Docs), but I always hit my number. As you might guess, I’m going to continue using FocusWriter after NaNoWriMo ends, though I’ll be dropping my streak minimum down to 1000 words to give me more breathing room to focus on editing my manuscript and working on other projects.
“It’s okay to lower your expectations.”
One of the pieces of advice that is often bandied about during NaNoWriMo is to “get out of your own way and just write.” As someone who is chronically in my own way, perfectionist tendencies and all, this was easier said than done for me. I managed it in a number of different ways (and with difficulty).
My primary strategy was to not delete anything. I might change the tense of a word or correct a spelling mistake if it was really obvious, but for the most part I would save that until my writing session was done (e.g. when I was done with FocusWriter and was copy-pasting my work into Google Docs). The “strike-though” feature became a close friend of mine. I also made a point to only edit sentences if there was something egregiously, horrendously wrong with them. This, thankfully, was a rarity.
My secondary strategy was to avoid reading my completed work as much as possible. Why? While re-reading what I’d written was helpful in getting me started on any given day, it often also switched my brain to “editing mode,” which was entirely unhelpful when I was trying my hardest to write. I found it much easier to use my outline as a jumping off point, as it kept my brain in “writing mode.”
The last strategy I used was to put thoughts about “deeper” elements of the story out of my mind (e.g. theme, symbolism, etc). Aside from the fact that I’m not trying to write “literary fiction,” I found that trying to keep high-minded ideas like that in mind AND to get my story out was too much for my brain to deal with. Maybe it’s different for other writers, but I figure I can always squeeze that stuff in when I edit the manuscript.
“A Word About Motivation.”
Here’s another one of my truths: writing wasn’t always fun or easy. I often felt like I was, “writing garbage and that I’d probably throw out most of what I’d written when I edited the manuscript (if I ever got to editing it at all).” On my worst days, it was easy to catastrophize, especially with the state of the world at large. When those thoughts came up (which was often), a number of things kept me going.
First and foremost, “getting my ass in the seat and writing,” was the most obvious answer to any of the aforementioned concerns. I couldn’t possibly convince myself “I wasn’t a writer” if I was regularly and actively writing. Also, while writing was never easy, it became easier as I kept going. Again, the ‘critic’ in my brain just had less to criticize when I was hitting my writing goal day after day after day.
Having an outline to refer to made motivation much easier to find. Why? I was never starting from “scratch,” and thus had to spend a lot less mental energy to get started. (In fact, some of my hardest days were the last week of NaNoWriMo when my story had gone off the rails and wasn’t adhering to the outline much any more.) During my prep, I also prepared a list of scenes that I thought would be fun or funny or cute; this came in handy more than a few times when I felt stuck on the main plot and just needed a break from it.
Lastly, the idea that I was “keeping a promise to myself” was my final line of defense when all else failed. I was more tired of failure than I was of getting my ass in the writer’s seat. In other words, if I couldn’t eliminate my tendency for negative self-talk, I would at least try and direct it to my advantage. If “I wanted it bad enough, I’d make time,” after all, so I did. There’s still a voice in the back of my head whispering that what I wrote is “still a turd,” but it’s MY turd. As I have so often repeated: “you can’t edit a blank page.” (As an aside, this quote is ascribed to Jodi Picoult.) In the end, I think that’s a big part of what NaNoWriMo is: a pursuit of quality through quantity.
“So What Now?”
I do NOT plan to keep up my NaNoWriMo pace. Frankly, I don’t think it leaves me enough room to edit what I’ve written. Also, I found it didn’t leave me room to work on other projects. Could I have taken a break from NaNoWriMo to work on said projects? Sure. Doing NaNoWriMo “properly” (according to no one’s rules by my own) at least once was a serious bugbear for me, though, so that was off the table this time around.
If nothing else, I feel the lessons I learned and the techniques honed will make me a more productive writer in the long run. After all, dropping down to 1000 words a day, five days a week, is still infinitely better than thinking and / or whingeing about writing for months at a time but not actually putting any words to the page. Plus, I promised myself that completing NaNoWriMo means I get to buy myself a little treat. I have no idea what, since I don’t long for what I did at the start of this project (see: “It’s Not The Tools”), but I’m sure I’ll find something.
In closing, if you “won” NaNoWriMo, congratulations! I hope that it was an informative learning experience for you. For those who didn’t, I still hope you learned something. For what it’s worth, I don’t think I could’ve won NaNoWriMo without my myriad failures (and a bit of bullheadedness to boot). I hope you’ll keep pushing yourself, little by little, no matter what. For my part, I know I may never be a professional writer (even as much as I daydream about kicking my job to the curb). I may never make a cent from my work, either, and that’s okay! As long as it keeps making me happy and lighting the spark of hope in my heart, I’ll never put down my pen (or keyboard).
