You know what I learned? Writing a novel in a month is really tough stuff. The goal is to have 50,000 words written in a 30 day period, which works out to 1,667 words per day. When I crunched the numbers the first time, I thought that wouldn't be too bad. Well, I gave up after the first week.
Almost a year later I tried again, and decided I had to start over. I had approached Live Fast, Die Handsome with the wrong attitude, so to start from scratch seemed like the best idea. I gave myself a new outline, a new schedule, and just started writing. No longer haunted by a daily quota, I really enjoyed writing the story again. In the end, it took me just over forty days to write. That's practically a month.
This year I'm taking another crack at NaNoWriMo. Now that I have my first novel under my belt, I'm incredibly confident that I can succeed this time around. In fact, you can check out my progress right here on my blog as I write and give regular updates. The story is called Pathogen and is once more a story about zombies. Sure, zombies are probably overdone, but they're easy to write, and this is a story that I am incredibly familiar with.
Below I offer a couple of tips for people looking to write a novel in a month. You should probably take these with a grain of salt though, since I didn't actually finish my novel last year.
Write an Outline
That sounds like a real no-brainer, and probably the most basic piece of advice I can give. You know who didn't write an outline for their first novel? If you said it was me, you'd be absolutely right. I simply dove in headfirst with an idea of what I wanted to write. It wasn't long before I learned that simply isn't enough.
It doesn't particularly matter how you write your outline, but it does matter that it's something you understand really well and can access easily. When I did finally buckle down and write an outline for Live Fast, Die Handsome, I actually wrote two. The format I used is actually very simple too, it's just a numbered list that represents the chapters. The first outline had a single line to summarise each chapter, but for the second outline I splurged on a paragraph.
The reason the outline was such a big help for me was because it didn't leave me wondering what I was going to write next. With an outline, you're not going to be wasting a lot of time wondering "What next?" but can instead just refer to your notes. It saves a tremendous amount of time, and it helps keep a consistent structure to your work.
Keep a Schedule
The biggest obstacle I've faced as a writer is finding time to write. When I finally did finish my first novel, it was actually in thanks to being unemployed and having nothing but time. This time around, I'm working full time, and suddenly I don't have all those empty hours on my side to write. So how can you make this work out?
Find a time that you're able to write, and find out how long it takes you to write. If you know how long it'll take you to write a chapter, it becomes a lot easier to fit it into your schedule. The most important thing though is to stick to your schedule. You're making an appointment with yourself, and it's up to you to honour that. Writing is a job, and you shouldn't let yourself skip work.
When you're following your schedule though, it's a good idea to give yourself some time off too. Just like working, you can't write every day. It takes tremendous mental fortitude to keep from exhausting yourself on a single subject, and if you're exhausted you aren't writing as well as you could be. The simplest solution is to take a day off now and then.
Limit Distractions
You're living in the age of the internet. Now more than ever there are constant distractions around you. Every time you get caught up in a distraction, you're not writing. My roommate likes to show me funny pictures he finds on the internet. It only takes a second to look at it, but then I find myself wondering what I was writing just a moment ago. By the time I remember what I was doing, he has another picture of a cat to show me.
In an ideal situation, you should have your workstation somewhere private. I'm not in an ideal situation, so I make do with something else. Simply putting on my headphones and playing some music is enough to keep people from cutting in. I also keep my writing schedule close to his work schedule when I can, so that the two don't overlap.
Ignore the Word Count
50,000 words over 30 days means 1,667 words every day. You can drive yourself crazy looking for some extra words to fill in, and then you just have to do the same thing the next day. It's also really impractical to obsess over the word count too, because it's not like you're going to stop your story at exactly 50,000 words.
Realistically, it's a lot easier to begin and finish writing with each chapter, or the end of a scene, or something else that feels like a natural place to stop writing. Typically, I try not to take a break writing where I wouldn't take a break reading.
If you're a bit short of your goal at the end of the day, don't sweat it. You can make up that word count later if it's really important to you, or you can accept it as a draft and edit it a later date. But I know that I've found it easier to say "I need to finish this chapter" than to say "I need to write a bunch of words."
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