If I Knew Then What I Know Now: NaNoWriMo Lessons From a Graduate of the School of Hard Knocks and Deleted Documents

Since attempting my first NaNoWriMo at age 18 in 2008, I have done NaNoWriMo (or Camp NaNoWriMo) 10 times, and “won” (reached 50,000 words) all 10 times. In doing so, I’ve definitely beaten the odds. I don’t have the exact number, but roughly only 15% of people reach 50,000 by the end of the month. For first-timers, the number is even lower. So how do I consistently do it again and again? Mostly, I’m stubborn and thick-headed and don’t know when to quit. But aside from that, there’s a few things I’ve learned to do (or not do) and a few tricks I’ve picked up along the way. If you find any of this helpful, great. If not…just get back to your story.

1. Save. Save. Save. Save. Save. Save.

On a hard drive. On a flashdrive. By emailing the document to yourself. By making a copy if you’re doing it by hand. By printing. Back up what you are writing on somewhere OTHER than your computer AT LEAST every 10,000 words, ideally every 5,000. Not that I’ve, you know, almost lost 25,000 words because of a frozen computer or anything.

2. Make a plan.

Some people will read this and think, ‘duh,’ others will read it and think ‘no way in hell.’ ‘Duh’ folks, you can skip to the next number. For the rest of you...there are writers who balk at the idea of outlining. They feel it ruins their process, or traps them, or is a waste of time, or throw off their chi or whatever. Fine. That’s cool. Do what works for you most of the time. HOWEVER, this is NaNoWriMo, and the number one reason people don’t finish is because they write a stellar opening, maybe a few expositional scenes, and then they reach 20,000 words and think...I have no idea what happens next. You don’t have to do a complete outline. You don’t have to outline at all. I don’t. I just make a numbered list (much like this one!) of what’s going to happen. Most of the time I keep it very broad, with only five to ten bullet points about what’s going to happen.

This is what my list looked like for my second NaNoWriMo:

A.             Sarah meets Ben. He tells her it’s time for the second trial.

B.             The kids travel to Underhill

C.             Sarah, Sylvia, and Ariana are tricked and captured by the trolls.

D.             Paul et al try to find them, and the human villagers are less than helpful   because they are secretly smuggling fairies.

E.              Sarah and her sisters plan and execute an escape as the trolls head out to fight the humans. The kids are reunited as the battle happens.

That certainly isn’t an outline. It’s essentially the kind of summary a second grader would write for a book report. Imagine you’re climbing a cliff face. It’s hard. You’re sweating. You have to find tiny crevices and cling on for your life. But up ahead, you see a ledge. If you just reach that ledge, you can relax, regroup, and plan your next moves. These are your ledges.

If you don’t have a plan, especially if this is your first time, you won’t make it. Of course, there’s always an exception to the rule, but for 99.99% of you, you will get completely stuck around 15,000 words, 25,000 if you’re lucky. So. Plan. Have those ledges available so you have smaller, tangible goals, so you have a firm, stable place you can aim for.

That being said…

3. Be Prepared To Go Wildly Off Script

I’ve written the same story in three of my ten NaNos, and the main reason I’ve done it so many times is because I didn’t know how to let go. Letting go can and should happen for a number of reasons. Maybe it just isn’t working. Maybe your protagonist just isn’t interested in the boyfriend you so carefully crafted for her. Maybe you’re spending so much time trying to get your characters to the trading post on their way to the space station you’re wondering why they’re even going to the damn trading post in the first place.

In the words of Elsa, “let it go, let it go, let it go.” Don’t let yourself become trapped by your own ideas or outline. In the case of the story I mentioned above, I felt like I needed to set up so many things--lying parents, a budding romance, resentment between two brothers, secret past connections between characters, a magical library, etc--that I never reached the meat of the story. The only reason I finished a complete draft of that story was because on the third go-around I forced myself to skip all the complex exposition and just dive right into the adventure. Then, to my surprise, when I looked it over, I found I didn’t need most of the exposition I’d left out. The story was strong enough without it. Another example: I wrote a mystery where two characters set out to solve one of the main character’s parents’ murder. However, on the way to the parents’ house, they stopped at a farm, and found themselves in the middle of another mystery. After trying unsuccessfully to get them to leave for about 5,000 words, I gave up and just let them solve the mystery on the farm. The resulting story was 55,000 words long.

Part of having a successful plan is knowing when to toss that plan out the window and develop a new one. You’re the god of your universe. Crush some small cities if you feel like it.

4. Don’t Delete ANYTHING (Even Inopportune Russian Mobsters)

The first time I did NaNoWriMo, my protagonist was an eight-year-old boy who loved playing soccer. I opened the story in the middle of a soccer game, and I made the team coach a jerk who didn’t really care about the kids on his team and placed bets with parents on the kids’ games. (Based on a true story. Seriously.) Some 10,000 words later, my protagonist ran away from home and hid in his school gym. And then I was stuck. How did I get him out of that gym? How did I reunite him with his family? How did I set up their kidnapping which would kick off the main plot of the—ooh, I know! What if the coach was secretly laundering the soccer money through the mob!

Oh yeah. Russian mobsters popped up in the middle of my fantasy family story. They were as appropriate as a tap dancing alien in the middle of a serious period drama. About 2,000 words after I created them, I desperately wanted to blast them into so many bytes of data, never again to see the light of day. BUT. The rules say don’t delete, and thank god they do. If you start deleting (other than short paragraphs etc that you realize immediately aren’t where you want the scene to go) you’ll never stop. As they say, November is for writing, December is for editing. Keep those dang Russian mobsters. If you need to, do what I did and highlight the portion you know you’ll end up deleting. But don’t hit the delete key until December 1.

5. Your Writing is Crap (And That’s Okay)

NaNoWriMo is not for careful second drafts. NaNoWriMo is for messy, desperate first drafts, and occasionally complete rewrites. The biggest benefit of NaNoWriMo is that at the end, you have a more-or-less complete story, or at least a large chunk of it. Once you have that story, you can hammer it and refine it and twist it and rework it into something that’s polished and shiny. But you can’t refine something that doesn’t exist in the first place.

One of the biggest reasons people quit in my experience is they feel like their story and/or writing are just plain awful. They’re discouraged and frustrated and can’t understand why the words won’t flow. It’s that way for everyone. TRUST ME. Keep pounding out that story, no matter how terrible it seems. You’ll be able to go back and change it later. And you may even find that those scenes you thought were so awful and pointless actually had a few gems you’d like to keep, or that tightening up the syntax makes the whole scene sharp and engaging.

First drafts are crap. Embrace it.

6. Finally, Tell EVERYONE You’re Doing NaNoWriMo

This serves several purposes. It will keep your roommates from worrying if you don’t emerge from your bedroom for days on end. It will justify the growing pile of dirty dishes in your sink. It will explain your sudden disappearance from the world of social media. But, most importantly, it will give you motivation to finish. Your friends will offer you encouragement and ask to hear about your story. Your BEST friends will harangue you for being so behind on your word count and deny you food and sleep until you reach the next 5K.

Dirty (And Clean) Tricks

A.    Hit 10,000 words in the first five days.

After five days, you should be at 8,800 words, so this isn’t pushing it too much. But if you can hit 10K, you’ll have a head start, and you’ll have a little wiggle room so you can step back, assess, and plan what you want to do next. I also find that the going above and beyond on the initial push really helps jump start my project and gets me invested in my story.

B.    Celebrate the small victories

Award yourself after you hit 10,000 words. After you hit 15,000. 20,000. You get the idea. For each 5K I write, I generally give myself a fun drink or snack: hot chocolate, a cinnamon roll, a candy cane, whatever works. It’s satisfying to have a tangible reward for your effort, and it helps motivate you to write that next 5K. When I reach 25,000, I do something bigger to celebrate the halfway point. I’ll treat myself to dinner, or go out for drinks with friends, or give myself an evening off and play video games. One time, Bug and I made cupcakes and wrote our characters’ names in frosting on the tops. It was a disaster, but it was fun, and it let us celebrate.

The most important marker to celebrate, though, is 35,000. That might seem like a strange number, but once you’re approaching it, trust me, it will make sense. 25,000 to 35,000 is the hardest 10K you’ll write, and 30,000 to 35,000 is the hardest section, full stop. 30 to 35 is a killer. You’ll feel like you’re out of ideas, you’ll be exhausted, you’ll feel like this is the worst story anyone has ever written, and each 100 words will be a struggle. So: I save my biggest celebration for 35,000. For the three years I was in New York, I got student rush tickets to Broadway shows. When I was in Ireland, my friends and I held a Star Wars marathon. Give yourself something to look forward to, and when you reach 35,000 give yourself a huge pat on the back. You deserve it.

C.    When you’re totally and completely stuck, have a character tell a story.

So now we get into the dirty part of the tips and tricks section. These are things you can try when you’re totally and completely stuck, and you feel like your word count is running away from you. First off: have a character tell a story. It can be a bedtime story, a fairytale, a myth, a movie, or even a comic strip. The point is, it should be something you didn’t create. Take something and retell it in your own words. Maybe your characters are in a car and someone tells a story to stave off the boredom. Maybe they’re solving a mystery and your narrator compares it to a Sherlock Holmes story. Maybe your protagonist and his boyfriend are just watching a movie. At any rate: give yourself a break. It’s simple, it’s often fun, it can be taken out at the end if necessary, and it will spark conversation between your characters and hopefully push you into the next scene.

D.    Fly over the sidewalk.

Every writer has experienced this moment: your characters are on their way from Point A to Point B. They found out something terribly exciting and important at Point A, and they need to reach Point B as quickly as possible to make use of this information. So you start them off on their merry way…and 2,000 words later they’re still not there. Bug and I call these “stuck on the sidewalk” moments. In comes from a story Bug was working on where her characters were literally standing on a sidewalk across the street from the warehouse they needed to enter to stop a psychotic assassin. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t end the conversation or transition them into just going into the damn building. We’ve all been there (my characters have a tendency to become stuck in council meetings) and it’s a huge pain.

So: just have your characters fly over the sidewalk. They’re planning to attack, and they won’t stop talking. They’re in the limo on the way to prom and they won’t get out. They’re preparing the dragons for battle but the battle never starts. The hero has to go in and confess his love for the heroine, but he won’t open the front door. Fly. Over. The. Sidewalk. Just stop writing the conversation or the plan or whatever. Jump straight into them doing whatever it is you need them to do, even if you cut your characters off in the middle of a sentence. You can always go back later and add things in, or, as I often find, you may not need that in between moment at all, and you’ll end up cutting the whole thing. Either way, these moments are killer, so if you find yourself bogged down in one, just teleport your characters to the next scene.

E.     Kill Someone

Or, if you absolutely cannot kill a character in your story because it’s a contemporary romance or a comedy or a memoir and killing someone just won’t fit, fall back on the most basic plot of all: A Stranger Comes to Town. The point of this is to shake up your characters and your story. Throw them off balance. Make them react. Even if it seems like the scene is pointless and going nowhere, keep tugging on that string. Who knows? Maybe that dead body will turn out to be the long-lost queen. Maybe the stranger who came to town is a harbinger of the apocalypse. Just saying. It could happen.

F.    If you can reach 40,000 by the 29^th, you can finish.

10,000 words in one day. Sounds nuts, right? Nearly every time I’ve done NaNoWriMo I have at least 5,000 more words I need to write on the last day. But it is definitely doable. You’re so freaking close, it would really suck to fail now. Just pound it out. Even if it’s awful. Even if you end up deleting it. Because regardless of how bad it is (and I’ve written some stinkers) nothing will change the fact that you wrote 50,000 words in a month. And that’s something to be proud of. You set out to do something, and you did it. What’s 7,000 more words? There have been times when I won with only 5-10 minutes to spare. So: don’t give up. Don’t give in. Keep those fingers locked on the keys, and go, go, go.