Oct 20 2008
What I learned about writing from NaNoWriMo . . .
We are only a few days away from the start of National Novel Writing Month and I wanted to start a countdown on this site by posting one of the lessons I learned from about writing from NaNoWriMo every day until November 1st.
If you have never done (or won) NaNo before, this should give you some tips that helped me or, if you are writing in a context outside of NaNo, these lessons apply in tons of cases outside of the contest.
Oh and if you still don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it’s a “contest” where you challenge yourself to write a novel (defined as 50,000 words) between Nov 1st and 30th. It’s hard. But when you accomplish it, it’s awesome! You can get more info on this at http://www.nanowrimo.org.
These will be coming in no particular order. . .
#1 Never look back
This helped me more in my writing than anything I have ever done. Do NOT go back and reread what you have written before. This is a huge rule and you must not break it, especially with NaNo. Even if you don’t remember a detail or realize that you put in a huge plot hole. Write yourself a note and go back and fix it later. You will make more progress in your story if you just keep tearing through to the end.
This used to be a huge crutch of mine. I used to go back and re-read the entire story before I started each new writing session. Not only is this a waste of time but I ended up changing things over and over again as the story moved on.
Trust me, there are an infinite number of things to fix. You might as well get all the way to the end because even the things you “fix” will change again before your story is done. As Dory says, “Just keep swimming!”
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