How I did it: Beginning with an idea which I had for some time, I made a basic outline (which is allowed and I highly recommend). Each day, I would think about and “play through” the section I was writing; some days I wrote one scene, other days several scenes; whichever was necessary to make my daily word count. And I always tried to finish a scene if I began it.
Also, I kept a spreadsheet of the times I wrote, how many words during that session, and any other pertinent notes: e.g. this session was very difficult, OR this session was a breeze. This allowed me to see my best times for writing and which parts of the novel were giving me the most trouble.
1667. That’s the number of words that you need to write each day to reach 50K words by the 30th. First of all, I knew that there was absolutely no way that I could work on Thanksgiving or the day after; just wasn’t gonna happen. That was something I had to deal with by setting my daily writing goal to 1800. Honestly, I did not do this everyday. Some days I was really in the zone, I would make close to 3000 words (my highest being 3194). Other days, it was pulling teeth to get 500 (my lowest day, not including the days I wrote zero words, was 771). And due to illness and burnout, I missed three other days, not including the two previously mentioned. This called for some changes to the daily writing plan.
That’s another thing I did: I set several short writing goals each day. Instead of 1667 all in one session, I set three writing goals of 600. I know that comes out to 1800 (but that was my goal anyway); it’s not that much once you begin; and as I said, some days were better than others.After those “unscheduled” days off, I simply recalculated the number of words I needed daily to finish on time and plugged that into my spreadsheet. Then, I tried to write at least that number of words per day.
Toward the end, my daily quota increased so my word count also increased to keep up.
The most important thing to doing this is to really want to do it; if you don’t, you won’t....
It seems to also help to have a good idea of the novel you want to write. I had wanted to do NaNoWriMo for several years before this, but November would arrive and I would just let it go by. I had nothing to work on, or I was in the middle of something else and didn’t want to stop it just so I could do NaNoWriMo.
The thing that helped me the most was having the smaller goals adding up to the total daily word count. 1800 seems like quite a few words when you’re staring at a blank screen, but 600: not a problem…. Well, usually not a problem.
Now that I have rambled on for nearly 50000 words here, I will shut up with this:
If you want to write: write, and if you want to do NaNoWriMo: do it.Best to you! 0 seconds ago
Read how I did it… 4 months ago
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