Posted by Elisa Beatty Oct 14 2011, 12:43 am in nano, NaNoWriMo
Writers, charge your laptops!
You might also want to buy some sturdy planks and nails to board up your writing-room door (though definitely leave a little slot for your loved ones to pass in meals and frequent cups of hot coffee) ‘cause it’s almost time to NaNo!!!
If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it’s National Novel Writing Month, a worldwide challenge to crank out 50,000 new words of a novel in just 30 days!
Back in 1991, twenty-one story-crazy folks near San Francisco got together for the very first NaNo. Not only did they emerge victorious, they convinced other people to join them for Year Two—and 140 people signed up. In Year Three, five thousand participated. Last year, more than 200,000 espresso-fueled novelists from all over the world took part and collectively produced over 2.8 billion words in one month. Yeah, that’s 2.8 BILLION.
Want a piece of that? You can sign yourself up right now at nanowrimo.org.
NaNoWriMo is completely free (though donations are welcome), it’s incredibly fun, and there’s LOTS of support to meet your goal.
The NaNo website lets you make your own Author Page where you get a groovy progress graph to track your progress. You’ll also get inspirational posts by published writers, cool Participant icons to post to your website, chances to team up for accountability with other NaNo-ers, competitive worldwide tracking of word counts for each region (will the San Francisco East Bay Region beat France this year??), plus great live events like The Night of Writing Dangerously where you and your laptop can party down in a local cafe with other participants and the beverage(s) of your choice for madcap marathons of writing brilliance.
The whole thing has a wonderful sense of creative wackiness that’s liberating and playful and will have your Muse dancing the mambo.
This will be my third time doing NaNo, and I’m as excited for November 1 as a five-year-old on Christmas Eve. As crazy as my life is (kids, aging parents, a ramshackle house with an apparently violent poltergeist in the plumbing system, a super-demanding teaching job, tons of evening meetings, and hobgoblins who pile up dishes and laundry and pet hair around my house while I’m away at work all day), NaNo is a beautiful shining rainbow of surefire creative energy and a virtual guarantee that I will emerge on the other side with many, many new pages written.
Last year, coming in for my second NaNo, I posted some advice for NaNo-ers here on the Ruby blog. This year, some of that advice remains the same, but some is different.
Here are my 2011 tips on how to survive and thrive:
Be loud and proud:
This was my #1 tip last year, and it’s my #1 this year as well. Tell EVERYONE you know that you’re doing NaNo. Post your daily word-counts on Facebook, put up a sign at work with regular updates, buy a NaNo t-shirt and wear it regularly, ask a friend to call each night to check up on you. People will cheer you on—and you won’t want to face the public shame if you give up halfway. If you do NaNo in secret, it will be all too easy to let it slide. (For the record: I’ll be back here mid-November with a Field Report on my own progress. I know that the fear of having to tell you all I’ve slacked off will help me stay on target. Hey, it works. And I want that WINNER icon to put on my website…not to mention a brand-spankin’-new manuscript draft I didn’t have on October 31!)
Loosen up:
Mathematically, if you want to write 50,000 words in 30 days, you’ve got to hammer out an average of 1667 words each day. For some of you, that may sound like chump change. For others, that number may be daunting. But remember: nobody says they have to be good words. To get the most out of NaNo, forget quality. Go for sheer quantity. As Nora Roberts famously said, “I can’t revise a blank page.” By November 30, you’ll have new pages—pages and pages and pages and pages—all ready to revise. Hurray!!
With my overscheduled life, I can’t devote more than an hour or so a day to NaNo, but I can still do those 1667 words if I just sit down and pound them out.
So send your Inner Editor on a lovely Caribbean cruise, take playwright Jean-Claude von Itallie’s dictum “Dare to be stupid!” as your mantra, and let the craziness flow.
Tape little squares of sandpaper to your Delete and Backspace keys so you’ll remember not to use them. Turn down the brightness on your monitor so you barely see your words. Set a timer and just keep typing (even if you just write nonsense) for fifteen minutes at a time. Have a glass of wine, or play Scandinavian Death Metal on your headphones, or speak your words into a recorder as you walk at your fastest possible pace around the block…whatever you need to do to bypass the overly logical, critical parts of your brain.
Plan ahead:
Of course, there’s no rule against being logical right now. Even if you’re a pantser, you’ll be doing your November self a favor if you do some sketching out of your potential NaNo novel over the next couple of weeks. Even just making a list of a dozen or so distinct scenes you think your novel will probably need is a good idea. Then you can just grab and go on those November nights when your brain is fried.
For those of you with plotter genes, you’re in luck: the supremely awesome Larry Brooks over at storyfix.com is currently running a great series of posts with all sorts of elaborate prep work you can do so you’ll NaNo like a rock star come November 1.
Ditch the guilt:
I said this last year, and I’ll say it again. If you’re a mom, remember that you owe this to yourself. An hour or two a day of NaNo-ing will not cause your kids to starve or your house to fall to ruins. The little guys can eat frozen pizza and your husband can scrub the toilets. Really. It’s just one month of the year. (Oh, and find a relative to host Thanksgiving. You can volunteer to bring the pies…and buy them from a bakery.)
Make It Work for You:
Theoretically, NaNo rules say you should start a brand new novel on November 1. Which is a beyond fabulous thing to do. I was lucky enough to sit at lunch one day with the charming, generous, and inspiring NaNo founder Chris Baty, and he talked about his twelve NaNo novels as “timber” he was storing up for later years: all those new ideas fleshed out that he can return to any time.
But if your goal is publication soon, and (like me) you struggle to find time to get writing done in your busy life, I’m all for bending the NaNo rules to suit your needs. My first year, I’d already written the first 50 pages of a novel I hoped to submit for Golden Heart, and used NaNo to write the rest of an 80,000 word first draft.
Last year, when my life was especially scattered because of multiple medical crises in my extended family, I jumped back and forth between a brand new novel, new sections of an older, unfinished manuscript draft, and pages of a novella I dreamed up on the spot. No matter how frazzled I was, I could usually pick up some thread in one or another of those plots that I could move forward with for the night.
This year, I’m hoping to finish the novel I started last year, but I’m ready to bounce around between manuscripts any time I’m stuck. The point for me is new pages written, and I know I’ll get that.
There’s always January:
Okay, I know some of you are going to say, “Well, all that sounds fabulous for methamphetamine freaks, but there’s just no @#%&**!! way I can do it in November, with all the holiday pressure at my house.”
You’re not alone…and the good news is, the Rubies have got your back!!
You’re hereby invited to join us here in mid-January for the Second Annual Ruby Slippered Sisterhood Winter Writing Festival, which is intentionally scheduled for AFTER the craze of the holiday season (’cause, you know, we’re women, and we understand).
You can read about last year’s Festival here, and you can sign up to participate in December.
(FYI: the Winter Writing Festival is a great time to work on revisions of your NaNo work, especially if you’re trying to polish up a Golden Heart draft!!)
So who else is going to NaNo this year? If you’ve done it before, what was your experience like, and what survival tips have you got to share?
Posted by Elisa Beatty Jun 27 2011, 12:01 am in motivation, nano, NaNoWriMo
Many Rubies and loyal Ruby blog readers won’t even see this post, since they’re already en route to RWA Nationals in New York City, their bags crammed with sassy, chic (yet comfortable!!) shoes, fabulous conference outfits, and silky, sparkly evening attire…
Me, I’m still sitting here at home in my usual writing PJs with the coffee stains.
I could be moping and feeling sorry for myself (just the teensiest, weensiest bit) that I’m missing out on the NYC glitter and glamour and fun, but I’m not, ‘cause I’m packing my bags too: for CAMP.
Remember camp? Sleeping in tents, finding weird insect life in your sleeping bag, suffering heart-wrenching crushes on the cute counselors, wearing the same mud-encrusted cargo shorts for eight days in a row, and drinking nothing but bug juice? Filling your days with lake-swimming and archery lessons and sunburn and ghost stories and s’mores around the campfire?
Well, this camp is just like that camp…except you don’t actually leave home, and you get TONS of writing done.
What camp am I talking about?
