Twitter can be a real distraction and you can find yourself wasting a lot of time browsing tweets when you could be writing. But before you get ready to cut Twitter out of your life for a full month, let’s go over some of the ways that Twitter can be a helpful tool during this month long contest.
- Use Twitter to connect with other NaNoWriMo participants and make some writer friends. No matter what hour of the day, there are other writers that you can chat with about their novel on Twitter. Simply set up a keyword search in Twitter or TweetDeck for “nanowrimo” and chime in on any discussion you have something to add to. Also, when chatting about NaNoWriMo yourself, be sure to add the #nanowrimo tag to your tweets.
- Hold Word Sprints with friends around the globe, no matter what time of day. There are not only word sprints going on all the time on Twitter, you can also propose a word war yourself if you know you need an extra kick to make yourself write more. If you don’t have a writer friend to start a war with, simply tweet out your request to word war with the tag #nanowrimo and you’ll almost always find willing volunteers. Follow @NaNoWordSprints for almost 24 hour a day sprints from HQ.
- Find helpful links, articles and widgets. Using Twitter advanced search, refine your NaNoWriMo keyword search to include only posts with links. (If you don’t know how to set this up, I have done so for you here.) This will get you all the articles that people are “retweeting” about NaNoWriMo which means these are the ones that people found the most useful. It’s a much better way to find helpful articles than simply doing a search because you have the benefit of knowing that the links you see are recommended by others. A personal recommendation, even from a stranger, is better than results from a blind search engine search any day.
- Find local meet-ups, events and write-ins. Twitter advanced search lets you restrict results by location of tweeter and this is a great way to find participating writers in your area and keep your ear to the ground for events and meet-ups.
- Build your Twitter followers and find new people to follow. The people you decide to follow during NaNoWriMo may turn out to be helpful writing resources year round. In the same way, tweeting about NaNoWriMo will make other writers more likely to follow you which is a great way to get some new followers.
While we are on this topic, you know who you should be following on Twitter? @HillaryDePiano. Trust me, she’s awesome. 😉 I should know. She’s me.
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
