Now, for your enjoyment, here are three (terrible) NaNoWriMo limericks.

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.

1. 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.
2. Hold Word Wars with friends around the globe, no matter what time of day. There are not only mass word wars 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.
3. Find helpful links, articles and widgets. Using Twitter advanced search, refine your NaNoWriMo keyword search to include only posts with links and add the keyword “rt.” (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. 
4. 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. 
5. 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.

A Word War is a time honored NaNoWriMo tradition but, if this your first NaNo, you may not be familiar with the term.

Simply put, a word war is a challenge to push yourself to write more words. You can do this yourself, with a group (such as at a write-in, on Twitter or the NaNo forums) or with a single buddy.

I highly recommend word wars as they are a great way to force yourself to keep going when you really want to quit and the competition can make you really push yourself.

There are no rules when it comes to word wars so feel free to make up your own. Race to 15,000, see who writes more words in a given time period, or just see what can add a certain pre-set word count first. The point is just to increase your word count in a competitive way.

Here are two simple ideas to get your started.

How to do a simple solo word war:

• Get yourself a stop watch and set a word count goal (such as 1,000 words). If you don’t have a stopwatch handy, note the exact time (to the minute) when you start.
• Start the stop watch and write until you meet the goal, stopping the watch when you finish. Log the time on the watch (or not the time if you weren’t using a watch).
• Keep a record of the time it took you to reach that word count.
• Now try to reach that same word count again, this time in less time.

How to word war with a buddy or group:

• Determine a set word count (such as 1,000 words) to add to your existing word count. (This is important because it doesn’t exclude anyone who is behind. If Billy has 2,000, he writes to 3,000. If Sally only has 500, she writes to 1,500.)
• With a count of Ready, Set, Go! everyone in the group starts to write.
• Whoever reaches the pre-set point first indicates as such. (This is most fun if you have to indicate you won with a bell, air horn or other such obnoxious noisemaker kept in the center of the room so it becomes more fun to triumphantly sound your victory. For online buddies, a celebratory IM or tweet works as well.)

Are you a word warrior? Please share your ideas and experiences below. Above are just two ideas. How do you prefer to do it?