Monday, October 12, 2020

A week of #NaNoWriMo #NaNoTips

November 1, 2020 is coming fast!  It's a Sunday, and counting today it's 21 days away.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Face-surprise.svg
Why do we care?  Because November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo!

What's NaNoWriMo, you say?  It's the month when writers [if you're reading this blog, this means YOU] are encouraged to sit their collective butts into a chair and write 50,000 words [average 1667 words per day, or about 7 pages] of that book they've always wanted to write.

[As an aside, whoever thought NOVEMBER would be a good month for this is a few elves short of Santa's workshop.  Just saying....]

Every day this week here at Operation Awesome, we're providing a #nano tip.  And since Monday is my day, I get to go first.  The humorous part of me going first is that I've done NaNo a grand total of ONE time, about 5 years ago.  On November 30 of that year, I'd finished 35,000 words, which means I didn't “win”. Translation – I'm obviously NOT a NaNoWriMo expert.  Other members of Operation Awesome have participated in NaNo more often than I have, and have even “won” and finished their 50,000 words.  So – their tips will probably be more useful than mine.

On the other hand, since I write MG it does mean that I finished the ENTIRE first draft of my current WiP in 30 days.  And this WiP is now on its #%&$ revision [document title FinalFinalFinalOMGThisHadBetterBeTheLastFinalOMGOMG], and I should be ready to query it in January-February 2021.  Yay me!

So if you want to get started on a new project, you should definitely consider participating.  Here's the website:

https://nanowrimo.org/

Sign up, check out all the fantastic resources and swag, and get motivated!

And since I'm not an expert, here are tips from folks who are better qualified than I am.

Writer's Digest tips

Reedsy tips

Bustle tips

If you have your own tips, we want to read them! Please let us know in the comments.


1 comment:

Natalie Aguirre said...

I've never participated in NaNo. It was too hard working full-time. Maybe this year I'll try to at least write more in November. That's awesome you're getting ready to query.