How to WIN at NaNoWriMo: A Month in the Life of A NaNoWriMo Participant

The Home Stretch

Okay, so you’ve managed to convince yourself it’s worth attempting your first go ‘round at writing a full-length novel (50,000 words in order to win a NaNoWriMo event, to be exact).  You’ve survived the deceitful, easygoing trap of the second week.  And—bet you never thought of this—the third week has went by faster than the other two combined.  Why?  Because we’re entering the dreaded, all too soon to arrive, make or break fourth and final week.

This is the week that separates the men from the boys; the determined from the defeated.  This is what it’s all been building up to.  This is where you may feel tempted to go back and make some “last minute” revisions.  “Just a few,” you say.  But it’s never “just a few” because it always escalates into “maybe a few more,” followed by “I’ve got plenty of time,” until you finally realize time’s up in only two hours and you’re writing like the wind to try and catch up 10,000 words or so, only to further realize "You blew it!  You’ll never make it!  You failed NaNoWriMo!  It was all for nothing!" (in terms of winning), and so on and so forth, until...

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  You’ve got one week.  This is not the time to start perfecting your prose.  That won’t come until you’ve written “The End,” which may not come until a few more weeks, maybe even months.  That’ll depend on if your characters are still lively and involved in the story as well as in each other’s lives.  Mostly, it’ll depend on if you’re still involved.  Just because the month ends doesn’t mean your novel has to end just yet.  It’s still your novel, after all, even if it was written because of NaNoWriMo.

What your main focus should be right now (what mine was, at least) is, first and foremost, not giving up.  Oh yes, you’ll want to.  You’ll want to give up now more than you ever did in the entire month.  “That’s crazy,” you say.  “Why would I want to give up on my novel when I’m only one week away from winning?”

Writer’s block, for one.  Think about it: more often than not, writer’s block is most prominent at the beginning (when you can’t find anything or any ideas to write about) and near the end (when you realize just how far behind you might be—and probably are—in your word count).  Under the pressure of producing, it becomes harder and harder to keep the same confidence in yourself as you had in weeks two and three.

For another, you may run into snags along the way.  Plot holes, seemingly impossible odds, and the lack of secondary ideas for subplots and character development...to name a few.  You may even burn out.  After three solid weeks of mass production, you can see how burnout could be a very possible factor; as a result, you may even want to box up the manuscript for good.

Not only this, but one of the main problems I ran into during the fourth week of writing was trying to remember important little details about what had already happened in the previous weeks.  You have to constantly remember things like: "Who did what?" and "What was [your character's] motivation?"; not to mention “Who was that minor character way back in ‘so and so’ chapter?”

I struggled hard with that last point.  After all, I wanted to write a coherent novel without any loopholes.  But I realized (not too late, thank goodness) that all that structuring stuff can wait until after you’ve gotten it written.  Someone once said, “Get it written first, then you can get it right.”  That’s your goal; has been all along, in fact.  It's during the fourth week, most especially, that you’ll need to remember this.  Thumbtack it to the wall above your computer if you have to.  Just get it written!

Your job is not to worry about how far behind you are, how overwhelming the task ahead is, how totally unsalable your current work is.  And it's definitely not listening to the voices that constantly say, “Why bother trying even further?”  Your job—from the moment 12:00 a.m. hits on October 31st, when you first set out to write your 50,000 words, until 11:59 p.m. November 30th—is to WRITE!  Not to critique, not to revise (how can you revise an unfinished work in the first place?), not to judge, but to write.  And you’d be a whole lot better off if you set that firmly in your mind before you finish this NaNoWriMo—and before you start the next one.