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November book writing challenge1/7/2023 ( Bonus Tip: If you’re looking for friends to cheer you on while you participate in NaNoWriMo this year, make sure to join my private writing group on Facebook. Even if you are working towards different goals, you can all keep each other accountable, inspire one another, and encourage each other not to give up. I have found that you are less likely to quit a project when you have friends working towards the same goals as you. If we’re writing fiction, we’ll read each other’s stories and suggest plot twists and new characters when one of us doesn’t know in what direction to take his or her story. When one of us doesn’t feel like writing, we will encourage each other and cheer each other on. Sometimes we compete against each other to see who can write more words in a period of 15 or 20 minutes. I think this is partly the reason why we both succeeded in completing the challenge several times. My brother Michael has always joined me when I set out on the NaNoWriMo adventure. You can just start with 500 or even 100 words.) 2. And it doesn’t have to be a big word count goal. If you’re not already writing daily, I recommend that you start implementing a daily writing routine in the weeks leading up to NaNoWriMo. ( Bonus tip: check out my article here for the technique Anthony Trollope used to ensure he met his daily writing goal. The Victorian writer Anthony Trollope observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” I will not fall as far behind, and I’ll be motivated to keep pressing forward. Even if I have a day where I only manage to write one hundred words, it’s better than not writing anything at all. Instead, I tell myself to just focus on putting words on paper. It becomes tempting to just keep missing days and give up on NaNoWriMo entirely. When you miss a day, the daily word count quota climbs higher. The author account on NaNoWriMo displays a helpful graph that tracks how many words you have written each day and how many you need to continue writing each day in order to reach 50,000 words. I find that when I miss even a single day, I begin to lose momentum. I’ll start NaNoWriMo with a burst of energy and excitement, but there’ll inevitably come the day when I’m struggling with writer’s block or I’m so busy I don’t want to make the extra effort to find time for fiction writing.īig mistake. Of course, even that can be a tough goal. That means just focusing on the daily word count goal of 1,667 words. To make that goal a lot less intimidating, it’s important to break it down into smaller, manageable steps that you can accomplish each day. I don’t know about you, but writing 50,000 words in one month always sounds like a very intimidating goal to me. ![]() These tips can help you work towards completing any writing project whether you are participating in NaNoWriMo or not. If you’re planning on participating in NaNoWriMo next month too, here are my five tips for getting the most out of the challenge and “winning” on November 30. This year I’m adapting the NaNoWriMo challenge and planning to use the daily word count goal to make progress on several different writing projects. I’ve participated several times over the years and completed the challenge twice, and it’s always been a fun and ultimately satisfying experience. ![]() There’s an energy and enthusiasm that you feel from so many writers around the world diligently working towards a writing goal. NaNoWriMo is a fantastic way to inspire yourself to make progress (or get started) on a writing project that you’ve been procrastinating over. Or maybe you want to begin publishing a blog post each day on Medium or you just want to challenge yourself to start a daily writing routine. Maybe you don’t want to write a novel, but you would like to write a nonfiction eBook or material for an online course or, say, a collection of blog posts that you can keep in reserve so you’re not scrambling to write a new blog post each week. Now, those are the official rules, but many writers adapt NaNoWriMo to their own goals. You can plan and outline your story as much as you like beforehand, but the actual writing of the story can only be done during November. The goal is to begin writing on the first of November and finish by midnight of November 30. If you’ve never heard of NaNoWriMo before, it’s a month-long event where writers challenge themselves to pen a 50,000-word novel (about the length of novels like The Great Gatsby or Fahrenheit 451). November is only a few days away, and that means that National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo!) is nearly upon us. Are you joining in NaNoWriMo too? Make sure to get your invitation to my private Facebook group for writers! Since I’m planning on participating in NaNoWriMo again this year, I decided to update and republish it. ![]() This is a post I first wrote in October 2016.
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