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

The Second Week 2.0

Week 2 Overview NaNoWriMo 2015, Nov. 8-14.

• Trying to split up writing in multiple sessions

• Willing to skip ahead if necessary (WordNerds Week 1 Write-in: "If it beats not writing at all, do it" Kelly)

• Plot coming along nicely with a new hero revealed (M.A.)

• Still managing to keep a good word count average despite several low daily word counts (as of 11/12/15: Avg. Daily Word Count: 1,737, Avg. Words per Hour [wph]: 886)

• As long as I keep at it daily, the story begins to flow and my creativity doesn't stifle

• DWS method working great to propel me forward (cycling, outlining after, write the next word, etc.)

• Realizing that I don't need 2 hours to write, as previously thought, especially when my average daily words per hour (886), is still 443 words when divided in half (30 min.)!

Weekly Totals: 11,871 words; Grand Total 24,365 words

Now onto the excitement (madness?) of week 2 of NaNoWriMo 2015! Keep in mind, this is my story of the events and how I interpreted them. My hope is that you are encouraged to try some of these ideas in your own writing—NaNoWriMo or otherwise—and see if you find them beneficial to your productivity as a writer whether in fiction or nonfiction.

Trying to split up writing in multiple sessions

After the first full week of writing all out until my fingers nearly bled (okay, so I'm exaggerating...but only a little), I decided it would be best to avoid burnout. So I thought, rather than skipping writing sessions altogether or continuing on with my powerhouse word counts in one sitting, I would instead split my writing into multiple sessions, usually in the morning and late evening. This would allow me to keep the thrill of the story alive and moving so I would continue to be engrossed and motivated in the writing process and, ultimately, stay on track with my daily word count goals.

Willing to skip ahead if necessary (WordNerds Week 1 Write-in: "If it beats not writing at all, do it!" -Kelly)

One thing I've always been afraid of is not knowing what to write next. A technique I discovered from Dean Wesley Smith's Writing Into The Dark (http://amzn.to/1OVUGql) is that when you're stuck in your writing, all you have to do is write the next sentence. What he said next blew my mind. In essence, it went something like this: "The next sentence doesn't necessarily have to be the the next sentence the reader is going to read." He calls this being "unstuck in time."

From this, as well as some encouragement from the #YAWordNerds Week 1 Write-in (video above), I decided it was time to bite the bullet and try skipping ahead to the scenes I was most looking forward to whenever writer's block threatened to rear its ugly heads (yes, my writer's block, like a hydra, has many heads that seem to regenerate more whenever one is cut off).

The great news is—and this is HUGE—once I allowed myself to break free of "linear" writing in favor of being "unstuck in time," I didn't really have any problems with writer's block. Honestly. This, in addition to the "cycling" method DWS also advocates in his book, allowed me to breeze through scenes and find myself writing the most words in a session to date. (2,610 words in only 1.17 hrs.; that's 1,248 words per hour!)

Nevertheless, I did skip ahead and write one or two scenes that I had been looking forward to. I don't exactly know if I'll be using them or not, but I'm sure I can use parts of them to fill everything out in the end. Something that wouldn't be possible had I not written them. So I definitely recommend this technique if you're struggling to come up with ideas, or if you just can't get a scene out of your head. It's best to write it while it's fresh in your mind and not weighed down with the fog of procrastination just because you think you have to write your story in the order in which it happens. You most certainly DON'T!