NaNoWriMo—How I Do It

Week two of NaNoWriMo begins today, and to kick it off I'm at 16,000 words logged! I make it a habit of writing 2,000 words a day, even though the daily expected goal is 1,667 (which, for you Math buffs, is 50,000 words divided by 30 days). I just like round numbers like that.

I started late in the game. On November 1st, the first day of NaNoWriMo, I was in Pennsylvania finishing up a vacation with a very close family of friends. On day two of NaNo, I was recovering from an overnight bus trip that ended up feeling longer than the ten or eleven hours it was. On day three, I started writing.

Because I started late, I ended up writing 4,000 words on day three. Day four, with my personal goal, would have put me at 8,000 words, so I ended up writing 4,000 more words on that day as well. Since then, I've been able to keep up with my personal goal, and it's in this way that I've reached 16,000 with such ease.

Don't get me wrong, it's not as easy as it sounds. The goal of NaNoWriMo isn't to produce good writing, but to produce a lot of writing, period. It's not supposed to be good, and so we're encouraged to ignore editing at all possible, even to the point that re-reading what you've already gotten out is discouraged entirely. It's a great way to write, in my opinion, because it prevents us from worrying and fretting over the quality. Right now, quantity matters more. So, writing 2k-a-day is quick work, especially when you let yourself get wordier.

Last year, I was inspired by Kelley Armstrong, the author of Women of the Otherworld and Darkest Powers. Not just the urban fiction style of writing, but the way I wrote. This year, I was inspired by Richard Adams. You may recognize his name as being on the cover of Watership Down, the tale of the rabbits seeking a new home away from the troubles that man causes them. Adams encompasses a wide range of information in his novel, and it is this that I'm drawing my inspiration from, allowing me to find things to write about, even if they don't necessarily fit well in the moment — quantity over quality.

When I write, I give myself a goal to reach. Not just the 2,000 words, but a reason to get there faster. A prize, if you will. If there's something that I want, I tell myself that I can't have it until I reach the 2,000 words that I'm aiming for. It works better than you think. Sure, there's nothing to stop me from getting up and getting that prize ahead of time, but the feeling of accomplishment that I gain by waiting until I've gotten to my goal is really more gratifying than the prize itself. And when I feel frustrated or discouraged with what's happening, then I turn to the NaNoWriMo pep talks, which they email regularly, to remind myself why I'm doing this, and that it's okay to write crappy writing. The editing process will come out later.