Ready, Set, Write! 8 Tips From an Award-Winning NaNoWriMo Novelist





Cari Noga wrote the first draft of her debut novel, Sparrow Migrations, during NaNoWriMo 2010 and published it independently in 2013.

This year’s NaNoWriMo countdown is down to mere hours. Your fingers are loose and limber; your document file is ready for that first save: Bestseller.doc. Organizers of the annual novel-in-a-month project say, however, that less than 15 percent of the more than 300,000 writers who start November 1 actually hit the 50,0000-word finish line. I’ve done it twice, in 2010 and 2013 (and, full disclosure, fallen short twice as well.) So the Foreword folks asked me to share my top NaNo do’s and don’ts. (Hint: they work any month of the year, too.)

Write in the cloud. Use Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, or anything that enables you to take advantage of all devices with a keyboard and an Internet connection. Last year, as November waned and I needed every single second of peace and quiet, I ricocheted between the desktop in my basement office and my husband’s laptop on the second floor, depending on where my kids were (er, were not.) Bye-bye worries over forgetting or losing a thumb drive, wondering if I’d emailed myself the very latest version or whether a file would get corrupted, all concerns which plagued NaNo 2010. Such peace of mind equals more creative flow.

Speaking of flow… Go with it. NaNo requires a fast pace, averaging 1,667 words per day. Writing at that clip, sometimes your characters get ahead of your story, or your story ahead of your characters. That’s OK. Trust that the dialogue you’ve been spinning out for four pages will lead to a serendipitous plot point. That the character you intended to keep minor but who keeps popping up will become instrumental to resolving the conflict. That despite choosing a setting you’ve never visited (raising hand), or a cultural background you know nothing about (raising other hand), that you can fake it enough to make it to December, when you’ll have time to flesh out the story with actual research.

Outrun your inner editor. Keeping up a fast pace has another advantage: Staying ahead of the nagging voice that seeks to halt your momentum with premature editing. Once the calendar flips to November, never go back to page one and re-read. That’s not just my advice. Authors as prolific as Stephen King and Janet Evanovich recommend only forging forward, especially for first-time authors, until that first draft is done.

Find comrades. NaNoWriMo makes this easy, through the regions on the website. You might be lucky enough to find a companion Facebook group for your area—or start one. Your fellow WriMos serve as a virtual accountability enforcement squad. After all, it’s tempting to collapse on the couch after a full day of work and family obligations. Knowing others would be posting their word counts every half hour kept me at my desk instead. If you really hit it off, you’ll find yourselves creating post-November goals and plans to stay in touch, extending the NaNo mojo.

Create habits. Even with the momentum imposed by a tough deadline and the cheers of comrades-in-word-count, you still must figure out when you’ll be BIC—butt in chair—and then show up. For a lot of would-be novelists with day jobs and families, these times tend to fall in the later evening and early morning hours. I found the combo of an hour to 90 minutes in the evening plus 45 minutes to an hour in the morning worked best. If I pushed the evening session too late, I couldn’t get up for the morning. Admittedly I didn’t follow through every single day, but having that framework also helped me when I needed to catch up.

Write at least six days a week. Don’t take more than one day off in a row during NaNo. You can’t afford to lose the word count. If you’re up on word count, you can look forward to wrapping up early. But don’t risk losing the rhythm of your characters or story by taking a long weekend.

Stop in the middle. Never get up after you finish a scene or a chapter. You want to make it as easy as possible to resume when you start again, so pause in the middle of something. One author I met goes so far as to stop mid-sentence. She also advocated writing a few notes to yourself, about where you intend to take the scene or the action.

Skip, postpone, or delegate all nonessential commitments. Unless you’re having it catered, this is not the year to host Thanksgiving, or catch up on your Netflix queue, or do much of anything social. But on Nov. 30, it will be worth it.

Coming in December: You did it! Now what?

Cari Noga’s Sparrow Migrations was a semifinalist in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, winner of the Spring 2013 Foreword Firsts debut fiction contest, and a semifinalist for the 2014 Best Kindle Book Awards. She’ll be an official NaNo 2014 coach the week of November 17. Read more at carinoga.com.

Cari Noga

October 31, 2014