While it’s great to reach 50,000 words, it should not be a measure of success! Being a successful writer can be different for everyone, especially if you’re disabled. NaNo participant Quinn Clark talks about their experiences participating in NaNo as a disabled writer and writing tips to keep in mind.
NaNoWriMo is the gold standard for adrenaline fueled
productivity. Oh, the allure of telling all your friends you wrote
50,000 words in a month! No wonder we all get so excited each year.
But
what happens when you have a disability which conflicts with the caffeine-bingeing, late-night-sprint lifestyle so associated with NaNo?
Here’s the secret: NaNoWriMo isn’t really about the 50k. It’s about progress — whatever that looks like to you. The path to 50k is just the most well-known version of NaNoWriMo: it’s less a hard-and-fast rule, and more a landmark to guide your writing journey.
November is just around the corner, and as we gear up to hunker down and write, we’re sharing advice from guest writers on how you can best prepare for a month of writing. Today, editor, author, and life coach Kendra Levin shares her favorite tips on using the classic Hero’s Journey to your advantage:
If you’re embarking on NaNoWriMo, you probably already know your way around the storytelling model of the Hero’s Journey. (If not, you can find out more about it here.) It’s a useful craft tool that can help you build a skeleton of a plot, gauge your pacing, and create characters inspired by its building-block archetypes like Hero, Mentor, Shadow, and more.
But the Hero’s Journey is also an amazing resource for finding ways to cope with the emotional ups and downs a month of writing can bring. Here’s how four character archetypes from the Hero’s Journey can help you get through NaNoWriMo and feel like a Hero doing it:
The Herald
A messenger who issues the Hero’s call to adventure.
Prescription: The Herald is the patron saint of beginnings. Beginning can be the hardest part of writing a novel. I remember once asking a writer how his NaNoWriMo was going. “I’ve almost started!” he said brightly. It was Nov. 20.
Two thousand is a big number. Sitting down to write 2000 words can be extremely intimidating, so the first thing you should do is make that number friendlier.
Write 500 words in 4 writing sessions.
Chop up that big, intimidating number. Start with a goal of 500 words. In one session, with no breaks, write them all. Take a break, then write the next 500. Repeat until you reach at least 2000.
If you write 650 words in one session, don’t aim for 350 in the next. Let those extra words add up. A few hundred extra words each day will get you to 50k quicker than you could imagine.
I recommend timing your sessions, aiming for 20 minutes each time. The deadline will help you get the words out, With 10 minute breaks between each session, you can reach your 2000 word goal in two hours. Which brings me to the next point:
Write fast.
Don’t stop and think about your words. Don’t go back and improve a previous sentence. Save all of your edits for later. Focus on writing as quickly as possible, throwing everything you have at that blank page. This will actually help boost your creativity. Make your brain work so fast, be so focused, that it doesn’t have any space to doubt itself and you’ll be amazed at what you can come up with.
But don’t worry if you can’t write 500 words in 20 minutes on day one. Writing quickly is a skill and it will take a few days of training.
Let the words suck.
This is absolutely key if you want a high word count. When you’re writing an entire chapter in a day, you shouldn’t expect the words to be beautiful. You’re not aiming at lyrical prose. You’re mining raw material that you can work into art later.
Letting the words suck can include:
Writing [something happens here] in place of a scene.
Letting yourself use cliches as shorthand.
Dialog that is really exposition.
Long descriptions of things that don’t matter.
Letting your characters ramble until you discover what it is they actually need to say.
As long as there are 2000 words and they relate to your story, they’re exactly what you need. And if you hate having bad words on a page, once you have your 2000 for a day, you can go back and fix all of it. Take all the time you need. Just reach that word count first.
Tip: if you do edit at the end of each day, make that a separate document from your official NaNo doc. This way, you can trim scenes, descriptions, and dialog without worrying about its effect on your word count. (If you make a scene/description/sentence longer, feel free to include that in your NaNo doc.)
Don’t know what to write next?
So you’ve written 1200 words, completed a scene, and you have no idea where the story is going next. Here are some things you can do to get those 800 words in anyway:
Go to writeordie.com and FORCE the words out.
If that doesn’t work, reread the scene you’ve just written and see if you’re missing some obvious foreshadowing, some clue as to where the story’s headed. (You can also add a few lines to bulk up your wc.)
If that fails, take a walk and let the fresh air usher a solution to you.
If that fails, skip the next section. Write another scene. Go where the story is waiting for you. Come back to the other scene at a later time.
Helpful tip:
Instead of breaking your writing session into four parts, break it into five. Use your first writing session to sketch out an entire chapter, like an outline, but with bits and pieces of dialog and description. Figure out where you’re headed and a couple of key stops along the way. Knowing what you’re writing towards will make doing the actual, fleshed-out writing much easier and quicker.
You can also do an outline for the next day’s writing after you’ve gotten your 2000 words for the day in. Future you will be extremely pleased.
For a full and updated list of writing advice, click here. All advice is by Marina Montenegro and originally posted on Writing the Words blog. (This list is updated to include August’s Romance section)
Make writing the first thing you do. If you write at least half a page as soon as you get up, you will find that writing comes easily to you for the rest of the day. Plus, you will be more focused and relaxed. Nice bonus, right?
Making writing a habit is hard to do but committing to 40 days, writing first will be a habit for you. I suggest to write 100 words at least but you are free to write as much as you want.
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. [It] will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.
We hope you’ve had a chance to catch up on sleep and are now starting to reread and revise your NaNo novels. Writing a draft is only half the battle, so today author Laura VanArendonk Baugh shares some questions to ask yourself when you’re revising:
If they’d asked
me, it would be called NaDraWriMo: National Draft Writing Month.
Don’t get me
wrong—writing 50,000 words in a month is a big accomplishment, and I’m
not taking anything away from that. But it’s not accurate to think
of it as a finished novel just yet.
Fortunately, we
have the next eleven months for revisions! Revision is not a
luxury; it’s an essential part of finishing a novel.
But without the
communal adrenaline of NaNoWriMo—and let’s be honest, it’s far
less thrilling to post “I removed a weak subplot” than to update
that purple bar—it can be hard to maintain that promise to revise. Rewriting is also very different than writing, so it can be hard to
know how to even start.
NaNoWriMo is well under way, and whether you’re at 5,000 words or 50, you may feel like your word count—and your morale—could use a little boost. Today, author and podcaster Mur Lafferty reminds us that NaNo isn’t just about reaching 50K:
So you started strong, and then fell off. Or something came up. Work happened. Car broke down. Cat got pregnant. Neighbor died. Life happens.
Or, maybe, you JUST found out about NaNoWriMo and thought it was a great idea—but then you looked up, saw it was already November, and are kicking yourself about missing the grand launch.
Oh well. Might as well quit. You can’t possibly catch up. But next year, right? You will totally be there.
Hold on there, camper. Just listen to me for a second.
The stated goal of NaNoWriMo is to make it to 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s what the event is on the surface. But in reality, it’s so much more.
It’s one of the first rules of creative writing you’ll hear. It may be the rule you hear the most: “Show, don’t tell.”
Today
I’ll explain what that rule means, why it’s in place, and then why
following it too closely can actually harm rather than help your
writing.
There are places in writing where telling is just frankly better, and even more powerful.
What’s the Rule?
The Rule:
Show, don’t tell.
Why it’s a Rule
Honestly, almost any beginning writer who is getting into writing needs
to hear this advice, and probably several times. When I was in college,
this was like scripture. I heard it every week, if not every day. This
is because naturally, we are wired to “tell” a story rather than “show”
one. Telling is easier, and if we don’t know the difference, we just do
what’s natural and easy.
But what is the difference? And why does it matter which you use?
Here is an examples of telling:
Emily was tired.
Here is how you would change that example into showing:
Yawning, Emily dragged her backpack on the way to her bedroom. Her
eyes drooped shut with each step. She fell into her bed and her shoes
blackened the covers. She rubbed her eyes–mascara gritted against her
skin–then flung her arm over her face to block out the light.
In my second example, I don’t just tell the reader Emily is tired, I
show them. There are a few reasons to do this. First, if I simply say
“Emily was tired,” as an audience, we don’t get a visual for what
“tired” is, how tired Emily is, or what kind of tired she feels. It’s
vague and general. Is Emily a bored kind of tired? Or physically tired
from running a mile? Or sleepy-tired? But when I show it, it’s clear
she’s sleepy-tired. How sleepy-tired? Tired enough that she can’t pick
up and carry her backpack, so tired that her eyes droop shut and she
doesn’t bother to take off her shoes before “falling” into bed. She
doesn’t even wash off her makeup or turn off the room’s light.
That’s how tired.
Second, when you show instead of tell it immerses the reader into the
story so that they feel like they are experiencing it instead of just
reading about it. It’s like they are there in the house with Emily, or
are Emily herself. One of the ways to do this well is to appeal to the
senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. In my second example, I
appealed to the senses of sight and touch. (In contrast, in my first
example, I appealed to no senses.) It’s important to immerse the reader,
so that they are experiencing the emotions in the story. If you “tell”
them everything, you’re (almost) never putting the emotions in the reader, so the story won’t be as powerful. When you “show” the story to the reader, you are allowing them to interpret and come to their own conclusions, rather then you telling
them what to think and believe. They become the character.
If telling still doesn’t seem that “bad” to you, look at what bland telling looks like sentence after sentence in this example:
They went to their friend’s house to see some cats. They liked them a
lot. When they got tired, they called their mom to pick them up, but
their mom couldn’t come for two hours. It was cold out, so they went
inside and got something warm to eat. Then they drew some pictures
before watching t.v.
How much emotion do you feel from that? Do you feel like you are in the story? Does it have you on the edge of you seat? Probably not.
Most all beginning writers write stories this way, which is why learning
to show, not tell, is preached just about everywhere. Telling is easy.
Showing takes work.
But like any writing rule, if you treat this one like a commandment, it
can actually hurt your writing and take the power out of your story.
This is an ultimate masterlist of many resources that could be helpful for writers. I apologize in advance for any not working links. Check out the ultimate writing resource masterlist here (x) and my “novel” tag here (x).
