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vorpal.livejournal.comAs a three time (and well on my way to a four time) NaNoWriMo winner, I thought I'd share my golden rules of NaNo with you in hopes that it might help some of you.
Rule 1: Set a daily word count, and force yourself to write it.
You need to write 1667 words a day to win. If you can't do this, it's very simple: you will lose. So every day, even if you don't feel like it, you hate your novel, and the idea of prying your eyeballs out with a butterknife seems more appealing than cranking out 1667 words, force yourself to sit down and do it. It doesn't matter if it's crap. Some of it will be crap. A lot of it might be. You can rewrite it later, if you like, but right now, if you don't write it, you'll end November novel-less.
If a day arises where you know you will absolutely not be able to write your 1667 words, then compensate for it in advance. You know that "I'll make up for it tomorrow" is probably going to end up being an empty promise, and once you're behind, it becomes incredibly difficult to catch up. Trust me. Last year, I let myself skip a couple days, and I barely crawled across the finish line. It was the worst NaNo of my life.
If, for some reason, you cannot compensate in advance, then make absolutely sure that you do so the next day.
If you cannot do so the next day, well then, you're more than likely screwed :D. I've seen far too many friends succumb to putting things off, and by day 15 they've written 5000 words and they still cling to the hopes that they'll finish. It's certainly not impossible, but if you couldn't write more than 5000 words in the first two weeks, you're unlikely to have the commitment to write another 45000 in the next two weeks.
Rule 2: Balloons and other toys are your friends.
Keep lots of fun things around for you to play with. I buy myself an assortment of Christmas lights, balloons, glow-in-the-dark apparrel, etc... prior to NaNo. When lack of inspiration strikes, I find myself sitting glumly in front of my laptop in the sea of balloons that is my bedroom, blowing on party noisemakers and wearing glow-in-the-dark bunny ears while hypnotically swaying to the blinking of lovely Christmas lights, and I realize that simply writing a novel in a month may not be quite as insane as originally predicted.
And, even if a sea of balloons doesn't inspire you, it makes doing anything other than lying on your bed and working on a novel so incredibly inconvenient that you're likely to churn out those words.
Rule 3: Give yourself permission to hate your novel.
The only year that I liked my novel while I was writing it was during the first year, and looking back, man, did it suck. The following two years, I was convinced that my novels were the most vile literary abominations that had ever cursed the face of the earth, but reading back on them after NaNo had completed and the resultant medication had kicked in, they were actually quite good.
During NaNo, you'll never fail to surprise yourself with how horrible a writer you can be. Your novel will be filled with tacky, cheesy garbage, but it will likely also be filled with some real gems, and you can weed through it all in December and figure out which parts are just so horrid that they'll cause you public humiliation if they ever got into the wrong hands and delete them then.
Rule 4: Resist the week one scrap.
Every year, after the first six to eight days have passed, I've nearly burst into tears at how much I hated my novel. It wasn't too late, I reasoned, to delete the whole piece of garbage and start over. And somehow, every year, I resisted - perhaps for fear of coming across as a far-too eccentric tempermental artist. And, consistently, week two went astoundingly better. Suddenly, my characters gained dimension and I lost my urge to punch them in the mouths for their obnoxious and completely witless dialogue. My plot developed a life of its own and moved in new, exciting, and completely unpredicted directions. I regained my love of writing.
For those of you lagging behind, it's still not too late for you to catch up, but unless you want to end up really behind, it's going to take huge amounts of determination and commitment. I'm not being pessimistic here, but you don't make it through NaNo without a whole lot of perseverance, and if you aren't able to muster that up, you'll find yourself on November 28th with 10000 words and no hope in completing short of risking six consecutive nervous breakdowns and possible institutionalization.
Of course, 10000 words is better than nothing, and something to be proud of, but let's go for the gold here, people.
So sit down, get your asses off of LJ, and start writing! I've got 31,196 more words to go... how about you?
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