NaNo Prep: How to Emotionally Prepare for NaNoWriMo

The 2016 NaNoWriMo site has launched , which means that NaNo Prep season is officially here! Today, Kendra Levin –senior editor at Penguin , life coach for writers, and author of The Hero Is You –reminds us that taking care of yourself during November is just as important as bringing your novel to life:

Dropping everything and going gonzo on your manuscript for a month can give you a serious rush. But you don’t want wake up on December 1 feeling depleted and exhausted. So how do you dive into NaNoWriMo while maintaining a balanced life?

Take Care of Your BodyGo on a grocery run with NaNo in mind. Think about what foods will require little preparation time and be nourishing. Pre-prepare meals and snacks you can freeze and heat up. That way, you won’t have to sacrifice writing time or nutrition, and you’ll have more energy to keep writing longer and better.

Get enough sleep during NaNo. That might mean setting a bedtime that you stick to rigorously. It may mean stopping writing at least an hour before bedtime, so your brain can have time to power down. It could mean sleeping later than you normally would in the morning. Most doctors recommend six to eight hours a night.

Recognize that sitting on your butt is not the only way to write. Moving your body can make your mind more limber. Build a daily walk or run, ten minutes of yoga, or your preferred body-moving method into your schedule.  
Take Care of Your RelationshipsFind writing buddies. Make friends with fellow writers who are participating in NaNo and establish a way to check in and support each other. If you don’t know anybody else who’s doing NaNo, take advantage of the tools NaNo provides to help you make those connections.

Let your friends and family know what you’re doing. Tell the people in your life you’re participating in NaNo and what that will mean for your schedule and availability. Explain why doing this is so important to you. Don’t be shy—let them cheer you on rather than wonder why you aren’t returning their texts or emails.

Return to reality once in a while. Pre-select a few days during the month—perhaps once a week—when you can plug into your usual communications. Choose the amount of time in advance and stick to it. This can be your opportunity to check email, return calls, or whatever you need to do to prune your correspondence so you don’t get hit with all of it in December.Take Care of Your PsycheKnow your limits. How many hours a day can you write before it becomes just too much for you? How will you keep from pushing yourself too hard? What sanity-preserving parts of your routine are you okay with temporarily sacrificing, and which do you need to maintain?

Build a daily de-stress ritual into your month. This could be as simple as taking one deep, centering breath at the end of every writing day—anything that helps you step off your mental treadmill of word counts and chapter goals and reconnect with the deeper part of yourself that is drawn to write. How do you connect with this place—by taking a walk? Yoga or meditation? Reading a page of your favorite printed sources of wisdom? Whatever you choose, let it be an action that focuses you, centers you, and brings you back to what led you to NaNo in the first place.

If you nurture your body, relationships, and psyche by giving them what they need, they’ll respond in kind. That support will help you write your way through November and emerge on the other side feeling energized and inspired. Who knows—you just might want to keep up some of the habits you develop even after NaNoWriMo is over!

Kendra Levin helps writers and other creative artists meet their goals and connect more deeply with their work and themselves. She is a certified life coach, as well as a senior editor at Penguin, a teacher, and author of The Hero Is You. Visit her at kendracoaching.com and follow her @kendralevin.

Top photo by Flickr user Tina Leggio.