NaNoWriMo update – Week 2 Starts Here!

[Editor's note] Icy Sedgwick, new to Fuel Your Writing, will be kindly sharing her NaNoWriMo experience with us over the next month. For those of you taking part this year, she has plenty of tips to help you out. For those of you who aren’t, hopefully you will get a great insight into what writing 50,000 words in a month is like!

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It’s now Day 8 of the yearly madness that is NaNoWriMo. We’re over a fifth of the way there! If you’re keeping up with your word targets, and striding ahead, then all I can say is “Well done!” If the story is writing itself, your characters are behaving and you find it easy to pen over 2000 words a day, then keep at it. Go and do some more writing instead of reading this!

You may feel that you’re falling behind already, receiving pep talks from the organisers and reading the progress reports from other participants, freaking out that you’re not keeping up. If you feel like you’re the Bride and your story is the Crazy 88, then sit back, take five minutes out of your writing time, and see if any of these tips can help you.

Stop following word counts

Some people like to follow the word counts of other writers as they find them inspirational. If you’re anything like me, you’ll view it as competition. So ignore them. NaNoWriMo is about YOUR novel. So what if your friend wrote 3000 words on day one? This is about you, and what you can do. Instead of spending that time following the progress of your friends or reading pep talks, use it to write, or plot the next section of your book.

It’s not too late to change

Is writing your novel more of a chore than a pleasure? Do you dread sitting down to write, wondering just where you’re going to find these 1667 words? Do you find yourself arranging your paper clips by size or arranging your pens according to the visible colour spectrum, rather than write your story? Don’t give up hope yet. There are two main causes for falling behind in your word count and both can be tackled with a little effort.

Time

If you find you just don’t have time to write 1667 words, then you can do one of three things. Firstly, you can quit. Secondly, you can alter the word goal – maybe you’ll just write 25,000 words in November instead. Thirdly, you can work out if there are any things you’re doing that you can suspend for the rest of the month, to free up that time for writing. You might even try setting a timer for ten or twenty minutes, and just writing as much as you can in that time.

Problem story

It’s entirely possible that there’s nothing inherently wrong with your story. It may simply be the wrong person is telling it. Try switching your focus to another character. Maybe a secondary character, or even your villain, can tell the story better. This doesn’t necessarily mean a re-write – a shift in viewpoint may be the natural progression of the story, but remember that this is a first draft. If you want to suddenly switch viewpoint 10,000 words in, you can. Just make sure you go back and rewrite the first section when you’re done.

Edit your work

There’s already a #nanorebel hashtag on Twitter so I am about to be a NaNo heretic - You ARE allowed to edit your work as you go along. I don’t subscribe to the idea that you just sit and spill out 50,000 words in a month. Yes, the point is to get you writing, but you may find the story flows better if you tidy it up as you go along.

Perhaps add an extra ten minutes to your writing time, and re-read what you wrote the day before. This helps aid consistency within your work, and refamiliarising yourself with your work regrounds you in the story, making it easier to hit the ground running when you do begin to write. It also makes editing easier when you’re finished.

So what are you waiting for? Get back to work!