Seven things I learned doing NaNoWriMo this year

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The annual writing fest that is NaNoWriMo is over, and I now have an almost finished chick lit novel of about 70,000 words to play with.

NaNoWriMo for those of you saying ‘you what?’ is an annual challenge where writers set themselves to the task of spewing out 1,667 words every day in November, so by the end of it, they end up with a book

I wrote roughly 1,700 words for every day in November, having started with 19,500. What did I learn in the time?

1. Start with a detailed outline. Seriously, when you know where you need to take the story every day, it’s much easier to write. I used Kristina Stanley and L Cooke’s book, Secrets to Outlining a Novel and the romance structure article on Savannah Gilbo’s extraordinarily useful website to help me.
2. Split your daily word count. Write the first 1,000 words in the morning (or whenever your most creative/productive feelings occur), and then do the smaller amount later in the day. Chunking the word count makes it feel much more manageable.
3. Ease into your daily word count by editing yesterday’s text. Okay, plenty of writing gurus tick you off for editing as you go on a first draft, but editing is the easy way to start your writing day.
4. Go with the flow. Write ANYTHING that comes into your head.
5. Use anti-distraction tools and software. My favourite is Brain.fm, focus music that aids concentration.
6. Descriptions can slow you down, so use a trick I learned from another writer. If she wanted a description of something she didn’t know well, she copied and pasted from Wikipedia (ChatGPT is good for this too), knowing she would come back to it later and edit.
7. NaNoWriMo makes you feel INCREDIBLE. Productive, creative, fulfilled—you name it, the discipline of writing those 1,700 words every day is like a happiness drug.

If you would like to read the first chapter of my NaNoWriMo book, you can find the excerpt here.

If you would like to read an extract of the book, click here

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