#writing about the two paths for now because 24 characters is a lot to juggle

[theastrophilearchitect]

I started writing a book.

And I’m mad about it, because I just started this post, brought up a new tab and lost it because I didn’t save my draft.

Anyway. That’s a thing I did. Wow.

As of this moment, this post won’t be going up until April 19th, but I’m starting writing this at 10.30pm on Sunday, February 21st, 2021. I’ve done a lot in the last couple weeks, and I want to have some record of all I’ve accomplished without just letting most of it fade over the next two months.

I’ve always wanted to be an author. From when I was reading under my covers with a torch past bedtime, through the years I wanted to be an artist, through the years I wanted to be a lawyer. It’s always been there - no matter what primary career path I went down, I wanted to be an author. The last few years, I’ve been invested in becoming a biologist, and that dream really took a backseat.

In the start of this lockdown, my mental health went downhill, and some advice my therapist gave me was just to prioritise myself. It sounds simple enough, but, even in my free time, I’d been focusing on schoolwork - revising constantly for exams I’m still not sure are actually happening. (Boris Johnson is apparently making an announcement tomorrow about beginning to ease lockdown, but we’ll see) So, on Saturday, February 6th, I started an attempt to coalesce the ideas I had floating in my head into something tangible.

I’ve tried to write books countless times (not technically countless - I have all the documents on my laptop, so I could if I wanted to), but mostly, I’ve never gotten further than a couple bare plot points and some characters, maybe some ideas for subplots, before I’ve stagnated and given up.

Three times, I’ve finished a skeletal outline. Twice, I’ve started to go back over those outlines only to realise they made no sense or just seemed week, and simply not cared enough to fix it. Until now, I guess.

February 6th, 7th, and fast-forward to my week off beginning the 15th, up until the 19th, I kept developing this concept I’d managed to form, but I was struggling to establish a coherent plot. I had up until and including a midpoint (which was later condensed into just a first act), but everything after that was just a void. I began searching for some skeletal structure I could apply to it, both to work on pacing and fill in the blanks. I tried several, and got a little further, but was about to give up hope.

Then I remembered a video by Katytastic I’d watched years ago about the 3-act, 9-block, 27-chapter structure she used, and couldn’t see the harm in giving it a go. And something clicked.

You can find the video here - the structure’s detailed and easy to follow, plus she even gives an example of using it to generate a plot.

I started binge-watching her writing vlogs in the background, and even started using her same writing program, Scrivener, which just made every a thousand times easier by taking away the need to juggle a billion Word documents. It’s fairly pricey, but I’m currently using the 30-day free trial - it’s 30 days of use, not of ownership, too: if you use it every day, it lasts 30 days, but if you use it once a week, it lasts 30 weeks.

Where Kat used the 27 parts the structure broke down into as chapters, I chose to refer to them as beats, and separate chapters later.

On Saturday the 20th, I finished defining my scenes and started writing an actual draft. I wrote two scenes, putting me at a collective word count (not including notes, synopses, etc.) of 2,580 words.

This morning, Sunday the 21st, I started over. I hated my opening. I’m not going to go through the mess of today’s process, but I currently have around 80 one-line-outline scenes, split into 3 acts. I wrote a draft of my prologue and detailed-outlined (which I’m mentally referring to as zero-outlining because it’s similar to how Katytastic does what she calls a zero draft, but is very much outlining, not a draft) two and a half other chapters. Scriver also tells me how many words I wrote in total, across notes, character profiles, location lists, a document I’ve named ‘Train of Thought’ for my ramblings as I go etc.

Today, I wrote a grand total of 4,141 words, which, rather counterintuitively, puts me at a draft total of 2,598. That makes sense. Anyway.

There are a lot of unknowns in the world right now, and I have no idea how much time I’ll have in the next six months to invest in this project, but I’d like, at bare minimum, to have one complete draft by the start of the next school year in September, which gives me just over 6 months. Which is probably too much time to actually motivate myself, but that’s not the point.

A manuscript needs to have a minimum word count of 50K words to be considered a novel, so, even though my ultimate goal for this project is around 80K words, 50K is going to be my goal for this draft.

I’m being optimistic about sticking with this.

Tuesday 23/02/2021 - Word Count: 3,099 I wrote nothing yesterday; planning to focus writing solely on days off rather than work days, but last night, watching through the incredibly long queue of Alexa Donne writing videos, I came to the conclusion writing every day, even just a little, would be the best way to ensure I keep working on this, so I set myself a goal of just 500 words a day.

Wednesday 24/02/2021 - Word Count: 5,350 After doing a little bit of maths as to how long this outlining and draft would take me if I were to only write 500 words a day, I decided to boost that goal to 1,000. I got started around 1pm today, online school draining me so much I couldn’t face another two hours. I worked on and off until 6pm, and around 4.45pm, I finished outlining Act One!

Thursday 25/02/2021 - Word Count: 7,022 I continued my scene outlining into Act Two, but I hit a brick wall around the midpoint. I have to write chronologically - some people jump around, but I have to write linearly, or it feels like I’m trying to make something in a void. It just doesn’t work. I didn’t know how to get from one scene to the next - there were so many things I needed to establish to get there, but I didn’t want to backtrack. I decided to re-jig the whole thing, but, after dinner, I realised I didn’t have to, and instead, decided to just start a draft, conscious of the things I need to establish as I go.

Friday 26/02/2021 - Word Count: 8,208 Starting draft one, I rewrote the prologue I’d already written, technically putting me to my second draft of it, because I’d been thinking about it for days and just wanted to revisit it, and it was so much better. Then I moved on to chapter one, but decided I wanted to re-jig my chapters. While outlining, I’d split the whole book into only about twenty chapters, but decided to go for shorter ones for more effective divisions of the story. I got most of the way through the first scene of chapter one, but basically ran out of both time and motivation, since I hadn’t heavily outlined that scene. in total, I wrote over 2000 words today, but because I only increased the prologue word count by about 100 words, it didn’t do that much to the total count.

Saturday 27/02/2021 - Word Count: 11,050 I got some chores done Saturday morning and focused on finishing my book so I could include it in my February wrap-up, but I still had time to get some writing done around mid-day. My goal was just to hit 10K this weekend, but I though I could do it in one day. I wrote about 1,000 words before feeling a little word-drained, but took a break for lunch, got back to it and wrote 2,400 words. Though that only added a little over 2,000 to the word count, it took me to 10K! I’m 20% of the way to being able to call it a novel! We’re in quintuple digits!

And then eight hours later, I wrote another thousand words and got to 11K.

Sunday 28/02/2021 - Word Count: 13,722 I spent most of my Sunday morning writing, though it took me more than two hours to write about 1500 words, though it only added about 1100 to my count. I decided to set myself an overall and weekly deadlines to hold myself accountable. Due to the fact I don’t yet have a clue how many words this will work out as, I decided I wanted to have either a complete first draft or 100K words (which I doubt I’ll reach, but it seems like a good way to make myself finish the draft before my deadline) by the end of April. Which works out to a little under 1500 words a day, or just under 11K a week, which is perfectly doable. Bearing in mind my current word count is including outlines, but I still believe in myself.

I wrote another 1600 words later, which took me to 14K, until I deleted the 300 word outline I wrote for one scene, but I worked out my words per day for the next two months with the assumption of a 10K word count as of March 1st and a target of either a complete draft or 100K words by the end of April, so I’m nearly 4,000 words ahead of schedule. Which gives me 6,606 words to write this week, instead of 10,328. (If you couldn’t tell, I like numbers. They just make sense to me.

Monday 01/03/2021 - Word Count: 15,005 I didn’t quite hit my daily goal, but I was completely leached of motivation today, I’m ahead of schedule anyway and I was only under by less than 200 words. It’s alright. But, hey, we hit 15K! Two days after hitting 10K!

Tuesday 02/03/2021 - Word Count: 21,119 This was an insane writing day. My end-of-day target was only 16,480, and that was still ahead of schedule - if I was sticking to the 100K by April 30th, I’d only actually need to be at 12,950 today. This was the best writing day I’ve ever had. I wrote before school and during breaks, which kept both my writing and working momentum up.

I didn’t read a page of my current read, but I wrote a total of 7,681 words and increased my wordcount by 6,114 words, or literally an additional 40.75%. I hit 20K three days after hitting 10K, and am 42.238% of the way to being able to say I wrote a novel, be it a shitty first draft that won’t be complete at 50K words.

I also finished chapter three, which I’ve been working on for three days and came out ~5,000 words, and wrote chapters four and five in their entirety.

Note to self: this is day 10 of vaguely outline-drafting this project.

Wednesday 03/03/2021 - Word Count: 23,364 I've only written 490 words today, as of writing this update, but I just wanted to make note of the fact I've done some calculations, and can reasonably finish my draft this month. I'm still not completely sure how long it'll work out to be, so I can't quite work out my daily words to finish on the 31st, but if I stick to my current 1,475 words a day, I'll hit 63,894 words by the end of the month, which is a little less than I imagine this draft will be, but if I stick to that as a minimum, my first draft won't have to go into April.

I'd like to post this later this week, but I already have a post for this Friday, so God only knows how long this will be by the time it goes up. So far, I've written 1,900 words today, and I don't think I'm out of fuel yet, but I'm stopping because I need to read today, and I'd rather not burn out. I'm over my goal, anyway.

Oh, also, I'm nearly at 25K, which is halfway to a novel, but I haven't broken into Act Two yet, which means this book will be 75K minimum. I'm going to do some maths and work out how many words a day to hit 80K by March 31st. 2,030. That's doable. So I haven't read, but back to writing for like ten minutes.

I've now hit an additional 2,245 words for the day, though I wrote a total of 2,663

Thursday 04/03/2021 - Word Count: 25,415 I've decided to work out how many words I need to write each day to hit 80K by March 31st, and watch the fluctuations. (I like statistics). It should steadily go down throughout the month if I surpass it each day. Today's minimum word count is 2,023, already seven words less than yesterday's. How exciting.

The last scene of Act One was very heavy on world-building I haven't yet figured out, so I stuck what was meant to happen in brackets and just moved on, meaning I have now broken into Act Two!

I think, during the week, I'm going to focus on just meeting my minimum word count rather than exceeding it, just to save fuel for the weekends, when I can write so many more words.

And, we hit 25K! I'm halfway to a novel!

Friday 05/03/2021 - Word Count: 26,693 In complete honesty, I'm beginning to lose momentum. Maybe it's just today, but I don't really want to write and feel like I need a break, but I'm going to make myself write anyway. I'm going to make myself keep writing until this draft is done, however shitty it may end up. I really hate first drafts.

When you say 2,000 words is only 7-8 pages, it doesn't sound like that much to write per day but my god. Luckily, most of the stuff I've had to save to a Pinterest board called 'Writing Motivation' says if you write when you don't want to, it should pass instead of worsening. I wanted to hit 35K this weekend, but I'm not sure I'll have the momentum. I'll at least hit 31,270, though, which is my minimum goal for this week. I'm still over 700 words off my goal for today, but I'm taking a break because my head is foggy and there's still eight hours left in the day. Besides, 700 after dinner is easy. She says, realising she's probably jinxing it. Oh, well. 80K by March 31st would be difficult, even if I weren't going back to school soon, but that's a stretch goal. 100K by April 31st is my minimum, and I'm 9,000 ahead of where I need to be for that.

I think I’m stagnating because I’ve hit the ‘Fun and Games’ section, which I find really boring. I’m going to try to keep going with it, but I may just skip it and come back later.

Saturday 06/03/2021 - Word Count: 28,150 So, I did not get the extra 700 words in. Before dinner, some stuff I had to deal with came up, and by the time it was done, I just wanted to go to bed, so I did. Today, I'm going to try to make up for it, which I think is reasonable because it is now the weekend. I'm still kinda exhausted this morning, but I'm going to do my best, and my wrist hurts, but I'm not sure why. You'd think it would be from all the typing, but only one wrist hurts - you know what? Never mind. They do both hurt. I'm just not sure why, but it doesn't hurt typing this, so that doesn't make any sense. Anyway, to hit my word count for the day, I need to write 2,555 words, which doesn't sound like too much, but it kinda is because I'm primarily writing Act Two at the minute, and for every thousand words I write, I lose like 400 from my outline. You'd think I'd just not include my scene outlines in the word count, but it's too late for that now.

I'm thinking this over, and I really don't think trying to write 80K by the end of the month is going to be good for either my motivation, mental health, or ability to function back at school, so I'm going to stick to 100K or a finished draft by April 30th, and re-work out my goals from there, based on yesterday's word count, so I'm not making myself do catch-up today.

So, to hit 100K by April 30th, I only need to write 1,309 words each day (which will decrease over time because if that's my minimum now, I'll probably surpass it, decreasing the amount of words left etc.). That's so much less pressure.

God, I really don't want to write today. I just want to watch YouTube and Netflix and read.

Okay, so here's the thing. I've been working on this story straight for three weeks and I'm kinda exhausted of it. I'm not done with it, not at all, and I want to keep working on it because it exists, which makes it workable.

I watched a writing vlog by ShaelinWrites yesterday, and she said she writes different projects at once, alternating in week- or multi-week-long blocks. I think I might try that.

My plan with this post and the following updates was to keep updating it until the day it goes up, the day after which is when I begin drafting the next, but, since I may be switching projects for a while and this is really about the project I've decided to dub 'Bay Tree' (which is just, I guess, a pseudonym for here because while I have no idea what it would eventually be called, I know that's nothing like the title I'd want to give it) so I'd want to start a new post for a new project.

I'm now doing a little outlining instead of actually continuing writing, but I think this will help me, though I'm still not certain about whether or not I'm going to directly continue with this specific project for the minute. Instead of setting daily goals based on a target, I'm also just going to say 1,000 words a day, and see where that takes me.

I've just been outlining into Act Three, and I've met a major plot stumble, but I'm going to work that out and explain what I'm doing in my next writing update.

So, go drink some water, eat if you haven't eaten in the last few hours, stand in front of the mirror and tell yourself how wonderful you are and how much happiness you deserve, and, if you want to write a book, stop thinking about it, and go write.

[echodrops]

Where do middling middles come from? I struggle with it myself, I know how I want to begin and end the story, but the middle somehow doesn’t seem „right“, and I feel like a lot of movies seem to struggle with meandering second acts as well. Where do you think that comes from?

Sorry my answer on this was delayed–this ask came during my grading period and then finals at the end of our semester. T_T

Anyway, middles…

To be honest, the core of the problem is probably thinking of the “middle” as a specific section of your story in the first place. We all know the montage: beginning, middle, end. But the truth is that while a story always requires a finite beginning and ending–it has to start somewhere and end eventually–what we think of as “the middle” is actually a vague, umbrella term encompassing everything from the moment your main plot starts rolling to the moment the story reaches its climax.

Rest under a read more:

Basically, this is the traditional plot diagram most of us learn in schools:

The problem with this is that it tends to create confusion about where the climax of a story is supposed to occur–looking at this, you might be tempted to think that the “middle” of the story should be an action-packed, important moment that really stuns the readers.

The truth of the matter is that the plots of most stories look a lot more like this:

The climax comes significantly later, typically only a chapter or two before the end of the book, and the “geographical” middle (i.e. page 100 of 200 total), instead falls somewhere in the area traditionally called the “rising action.”

So where do boring, poorly-paced middles come from? Why do people struggle to figure out what to put in their story’s “middle”?

Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons people struggle with middles:

1. Misunderstanding what “rising action” means and how it should be constructed.

If I ask my students to define “rising action,” the answer I usually get is “A series of events that leads up to the story’s climax.” From a technical standpoint, this answer is correct–we have to get from the beginning to the story’s climax somehow, right?

But from a practical stand point, thinking of rising action as nothing more than “the events leading up to my story’s biggest moment” inevitably results in a stale, linear, and inorganic middle. If every action and moment from the beginning of the story to the climax all contributes to the same plot, the result is typically a robotic, uninteresting series of events where characters feel less like they’re acting for themselves, and more like they’re toy soldiers marching to the author’s orders–they’re being forced to jump through a predetermined set of hurdles to get to someone else’s goal, rather than being allowed to naturally change, develop, and exist outside of the story’s main conflict.

All too often, the writing thought process is: “I know where my story starts–Point A. And I know where I want it to end–Point B. Now I just need to get my characters from Point A to Point B!” And that’s… it. The sum total of thought put into the middle: just get from Point A to Point B.

But that’s not how human beings–and characters written by human beings–work. We’re not linear; we’re messy. We don’t take the right path every time. We backtrack. We get distracted. We’re often juggling more than one problem at once. We avoid conflict like the plague.

Reducing the middle of your story to a vehicle for getting characters from Point A to Point B denies them–and your readers–crucial opportunities for humanization, crucial opportunities to add depth and meaning to their plot, and in general limits realism and makes characters feel one-dimensional. If you’ve ever sat through a middle where you just didn’t emotionally engage with the characters at all, it’s probably because that middle was more focused on getting characters to the big climax than on allowing them to be “real” people or live for a second outside of the story’s single main conflict.

Okay, all well and good for me to say this, but how do you fix it?

Rethink your rising action. Even in the most basic and brief of plots (i.e. vignettes or short stories), rising action is never a single straight line from Point A to Point B. If you want your middle to feel realistic and engaging, let it reflect the behaviors and thought processes that real humans experience:

Mad MS Paint skills.

If you want your middle to be more than a stale Point A -> Point B, then fill it things that make your characters human: small, unexpected challenges. Chances to overcome lower-stakes conflict to learn new skills and enforce character growth. Fill in details of their life with flashbacks and side moments that help us readers better visualize and empathize with them. Let them make mistakes. Let them struggle to find the right way forward. Let them think about things other than the main plot absolutely 24/7.

It is true that events needs to ramp up as the story progress–the conflict needs to get more and more personal, more and more “threatening” or at least important to the main character (and therefore the readers)–but instead of throwing all your chips down on one massive climax, build in some smaller scale conflict moments throughout the “middle,” some tiny climaxes along the way, each one helping your character learn something new about themself, others, the world around them, yes, even the main plot…

Except when writing the shortest of short stories, just like real life, your plot should (usually) never present just ONE challenge to its protagonist. Every major event in our human lives is a complex, interconnected network of prior experiences and growth, trial and error, emotional baggage and interplay between people. That’s what good middles are full of. If you’re struggling to figure out what to put in your story’s middle, it’s probably because you’re so fixated on “Point A -> Point B” that you haven’t given enough thought to the complex journey in between. Don’t let your set-in-stone plans for the story’s “end” distract and limit you or your characters!

This is already really long, but I did say there were two possible problems with middles, so:

2. The climax happens prematurely. Don’t look at me, I didn’t pick the term.

Oftentimes a story seems to wander and lose focus before reaching its big climax, because of rising action that lacks depth and pizzazz. But the opposite problem can also occur: it’s possible for the rising action to be way too short, resulting in a climax that comes too early–closer to the geographical middle of the book–leaving a ton of space for falling action… But the author had nothing good to put there.

If you’ve ever seen a movie or read a book where there was an awesome, moving, incredible scene in the middle, and then it just seems to drag on and on before finally petering out with a whimper instead of bang, what’s going on is that the author jumped to the climax too early, with nothing solid or meaningful to fill in the gaps afterward. As a result, there are a bunch of included “here’s what happened after everyone went home” scenes, often with very little emotional pay-out, leaving readers wondering why the story is still… going… on… (And it’s usually still going on because the author had some epilogue idea in mind and realized they had to fill the gaps between the climax and the epilogue, see Problem #1 again.)

While it is possible to write stories where the main explosion of the conflict occurs in the dead-middle of the book/story (hell, you can even write stories where the major climax occurs FIRST), doing this requires you to shift the goalposts–it’s no longer a “character grows and, in time, overcomes main conflict and gets a happy ending;” instead, it’s “these characters experienced an intense conflict… now here’s how they handle and cope with what comes after.” When the climax happens earlier than “the end,” the focus of the story has to shift to really examining the aftermath, the implications and effects of the climax. Unless this shift occurs and the story becomes one of hurting, healing, and reflection after a massive conflict/upheaval, then we end up with a meandering second act that never packs the punch readers really want as the story winds down.

So like… don’t do this unless you really know what you’re doing, I guess? (Or you’re willing to fail until you figure it out, that works too…)

tl;dr: My tips for writing a good middle are:

1. Plan out several smaller scale moments of conflict, several “mini” climaxes/challenges for your main character to overcome as the story progresses. These smaller scale climaxes are excellent moments for your characters to learn new skills, gain more knowledge, or grow as people, which will then help build up to the major climax. Use these smaller scale “high points” to keep the middle feeling action-packed while also preventing the story from feeling like the characters are just robots marching from Point A to Point B.

2. When trying to plan out mini conflicts, think about A) what skills, traits, knowledge, etc. your character NEEDS to learn/develop in order to ultimately overcome the main conflict. What are some realistic and interesting ways for your character to gain these skills/knowledge/emotional growth, etc.? and B) In what ways can you involve other characters in this? These miniature moments of challenge and struggle are EXCELLENT places for clashes and connections between characters to grow and deepen.

3. Remember that characters are generally written by humans and should act like humans (seriously, even fantasy characters need to have a bit of humanization to them, or your readers won’t be able to care about their stories), so unless you REALLY have no spare space in your story, plan for mistakes, backtracking, misunderstandings, distractions, flashbacks, side plots, etc. Let your characters live and breathe in the middle–don’t mindlessly force them on a linear path towards your goal for them. LET THEM LIVE, GOD.

4. Unless you intentionally are writing a story about aftermath, recovery, or how people handle a traumatic experience, save the major climax for near the end of the story. Don’t put the moment of highest emotion and struggle and meaning in the dead middle of your book and leave yourself with five more chapters to fill and nothing but epilogue content to fill them with. Don’t be fooled by the pyramid–the climax in most stories comes in the last few chapters!

Phew, I think that about covers it. Hopefully this is what you were looking for.

[konnl]

How to Finish NaNoWriMo in Two Weeks

November is upon us! Another year of NaNoWriMo. For those that do not know, NaNoWriMo is the National November Writing Month. You can find out more on their website. 2018 was the first year I’ve participated since 2015. You can learn a lot in three years away from something. Needless to say, I was pretty excited to tackle the 50,000 words in a one-month challenge with all of my new experiences.

November 1st hit and NaNoWriMo began. The first couple of days I was slow at getting into the rhythm, but I found a consistent groove. Eleven days later I reached 50,450 words, an average of 4,500 per day. A number of people were curious about how I achieved this, so this blog post will shed some light on how you can do NaNoWriMo in two weeks too.

NaNoWriMo in Two weeks? How?

Let’s back up a few months, because the truth is, the writing process began before November. This does not include the first draft. You can save a ton of time during NaNoWriMo by doing some… planning!

Planning for NaNoWriMo

That headline will make pantsers shiver. Planning? That’s crazy! Plotters aren’t more effective than pantsers. Personally, I do a bit of both. There’s a lot to be said for improvisation. Before NaNoWriMo starts, you probably have some idea what you want to write about, otherwise, why else are you participating?

You’ll want to start thinking about NaNoWriMo probably a couple of months in advance, if not even further back, like in July. NaNoWriMo sends out newsletters throughout the year and reminds you about the looming November first. They encourage planning too!

While planning for NaNoWriMo, you’ll want a document (or pieces of paper) for each of the following:

Premise and Goals: This document includes, your premise, word count goal and genre. This process is taken right out of the Story Grid book by Shawn Coyne (mentioned further down). Writing down your premise is the starting point of knowing what story you’re writing. Some of this is covered in an earlier blog post series titled ‘Want to Write a Fiction Novel?’ too.

Character Sheets: This is the most valuable document. Character sheets are your first introduction into the people that make your novel real. Define their wants, desires, goals and struggles. The sooner you become familiar with your characters, the more intuitive their actions, and dialogue will be in your writing. Characters are covered in a blog series I wrote if you want more information on the topic.

Outline: Now that you have a premise and your character sheets, it is time to scope out the plot. Your outline can be as unclear or as detailed as you like. I limit my chapter outlines to vague, one-pagers. Some people plot down to the beat of the novel. Find a comfort zone for you. You’re looking to give yourself a general path of where the story will go from chapter to chapter. The outline is not written in stone and chances are you’ll make changes to the story in the first draft.

Research: I saved this as the last point, not that these bullets are in numerical order, but research is incredibly important. Depending on your genre, this could mean world building or studying an industry or learning about a specific time period. The more you research about your world/time setting, the less guesswork you have to do in your first draft. Research can also spark ideas for scenes. A more detailed blog post on research can be found here.

More Pre-planning Means Less Work in November

The planning points mentioned are all about exploring the creative work from a story and plot perspective. So when November first hits, you can focus entirely on the flow of the first draft. You’re not distracted by trying to come up with scenes, where the story is going, or getting to know your characters. You’ve done all that and have a clear roadmap on where to go and are familiar with how your characters are going to behave. You won’t be juggling a bunch of tasks in your head. You can focus on one job: writing an engaging first draft.

Don’t Edit!

Not editing is a no-brainer that is stated by many people during NaNoWriMo. I thought I’d touch base on it though to reiterate the importance of not editing. While writing your first draft, put that editor hat aside and be the writer! Sure, your draft is going to have typos, you’ll probably delete that sentence you just wrote, and that is okay. Your goal in the first draft is to create something to work with for the second and third draft when you do put the editor hat on. Make mistakes and get messy.

Writing Ritual

Life is crazy, and we all have obligations that keep us away from writing. In a perfect world, we could write all day and take our time. Because we are limited to 24 hours per day, we can only do so much before we go insane.

To fit NaNoWriMo into your day, dedicate a time to focus on your writing. Write at this time every day. This will become your writing ritual for the month. The dedicated time could involve getting up an hour early each day or going to be an hour later. The routine might be split into fragments, possibly a bit during your lunch break or just before dinner. Either way, set some time aside every day and put that phone away. If you need more info on distractions, check out a blog post I wrote on it.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Let’s reference that old fable involving the tortoise and the hair. NaNoWriMo is more like a marathon than it is a sprint. Keep yourself at a steady pace and track your word count, NaNoWriMo has a ton of fun stats to help you plan your progression. Write each day consistently and don’t over-do it one day just because you can. You’ll risk burning yourself out for days to come and set yourself back.

During NaNoWriMo, I split my writing sessions into one-hour sessions by removing my phone, turning off my email and turning on some music. Some days I did two-hour sessions, depending on how the rest of my day was scheduled. After an hour I usually need to step away from writing to clear my head.

Learning, Reading, Improving

Over the course of this year, I got my hands on some resource material that explored methods of writing better stories, writing with more precise goals and writing faster. These books were massive contributions for me to finish NaNoWriMo in 11 days.

The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne

Truthfully, I was unaware of this book until a good friend, and fellow author gave it to me. He highly recommended the approaches it covered, so I gave it a go. The way Shawn Coyne systematically breaks down a book by clear, obtainable goals, was a major eye-opener. It gets pretty technical, and I have yet to apply all of it. There are a lot of powerful methods you can use from the book before you even start your first draft.

5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter by Chris Fox

Pretty bold title hey? Chris Fox’s book has caught my eye for a good year or so, and I kept putting it off. After reading Story Gird, I figured I should finally give it a go. My writing speed wasn’t anywhere close to what I wanted. I’d be impressed if I could do 1,000 words in an hour. This book offers insight into how you can increase your speed by tracking your words per minute, remove distractions and set up a writing ritual. Ultimately it comes down to writing more frequently will improve your writing speed.

I have yet to reach the wonderful 5,000 words an hour (or apply everything mentioned in the book), but this resource did double my word count per hour. During NaNoWriMo, I averaged about 2,000 words an hour. Some days I did a bit more than that.

Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel by Lisa Cron

I picked up this book in October, so I haven’t finished it. So far it is worth the read. This book proposes complete opposite techniques mentioned in the Story Grid and 5,000 Words Per Hour by focusing on your protagonist internal story and less on external plotting events.

Summary of Finishing NaNoWriMo in Two Weeks

To recap what we covered:

Pre-Plan: This can be as detailed or as minimal as you want. Usually, the more you outline, the less work you have during NaNoWriMo. Study everything you can about your book, genre and time setting. If it is fantasy or science fiction, research often transcribes to world building. You’ll want to start pre-planning a couple of months in advance to give yourself plenty of time to explore.

Ritual: During NaNoWriMo keep a consistent routine. This is your new religion for the month, do it every day and keep at it. Don’t over-do it one day and exhaust yourself. You will cover more words over time.

Read: Resources are significant. Always practice and continue to learn as a writer. You’ll never stop finding ways to improve.

Comments? Additional Tips?

If you have questions, feedback or have insights into writing the first draft quickly, share them in the comments! We’d love to hear it.