Pro Tips from a NaNo Coach: Break Your Goal Down into Bite-Sized Pieces

NaNoWriMo can seem like a daunting task sometimes, for NaNo newbies and veterans alike. Fortunately, author Emily X.R. Pan is here to share her advice on how to overcome some of NaNo’s obstacles:

There are a few things about NaNoWriMo
that are true for me every single year:

It completely reinvigorates my writing practice.
It challenges me.
It’s absolutely daunting.

The
first point: I always refer to my writing as a practice. It works
your brain just like a muscle training to lift more weight, or to
play a piece on the piano. The more we practice, the stronger our
writing muscle. NaNoWriMo is like a month-long boot camp.

Number
two: No matter how many years I’ve spent writing book-length
projects, it never gets easier. It’s my primary job now, and it’s
still a
struggle. Just like a marathon challenges a runner in good shape,
NaNoWriMo challenges even those who write all the time.

Finally:
We’re all doing this for the same reason. We want to finish a draft
of a novel. Whether it’s your first book or your twentieth, there’s
always the nagging question: Can
I do it? The answer is: Yes,
absolutely. Believing it is half the battle.

I
guess I’m following the rule of threes in this blog post. So here
are my three favorite tips from my years of NaNoWriMo-ing:

Tip #1: Break your goal down into bite-sized pieces.

I gave away my biggest piece of advice in the title of this blog
post, but I think it’s the key that unlocks all doors.

I
swear by this. I almost even believe it’s the only tip you really
need. The end goal is 50,000—or however many—words in one month.
But how do you carry yourself from one word to the next?

Visualize
for a moment that you’re in a spaceship looking down at the Great
Wall of China. You can see almost all of it; you can see just how
daunting it’ll be. But when you’re actually climbing the Great
Wall, you’re zoomed in up close, focused only on just the stretch
of stone immediately ahead and behind. You have
to take it one step at a time.

We
have to stop thinking about those 50,000 words and what they’ll
look like all together. We have to focus on the little steps. I
prefer to approach it in terms of the story—it’s more organic. I
break my story into pieces and use those to set mini-goals. I’ll
tell myself I have to introduce this character before breakfast. I
have to set up a new conflict before I run to a meeting. I get ice
cream once these characters reach the crucial part of their
conversation. In these little chunks of 100 and 200 and 500 words,
you’ll reach the 1667-word daily goal. And day by day, you’ll
inch your way closer to that finish line.

Tip #2: No amount of spare time is
ever ‘not enough time’ to write.

I
always surprise myself with how much I can get done in little
snatches of five or ten minutes. Carry a notebook with you
everywhere: I’ve done so much writing in the time spent waiting for
a friend to arrive at a restaurant, or sitting in a doctor’s
office. For these small, unpredictable periods, why not try setting
the goal of just doing the
smallest something? Even half
of a new sentence might be just what you need to push forward in your
next session.

Tip #3: Pause your writing in a place where you already know what’s coming next.

I live by this trick that apparently was also Ernest Hemingway’s
rule.

It’s
so much quicker for me to find my momentum again if I come back to
work in the middle of a scene and already know how the rest of it
needs to play out. So I try to end each writing session in a place
where I know what’s coming next.

So
there you have it. Get those pens and fingers into position. Ready?
Set. Go!

Emily X.R. Pan is the author of THE ASTONISHING COLOR OF AFTER, which comes out on March
20, 2018. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, but was originally born in
the Midwestern United States to immigrant parents from Taiwan. She received her
MFA in fiction from the NYU Creative Writing Program, where she was a Goldwater
Fellow. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Bodega Magazine, and a
2017 Artist-in-Residence at Djerassi. Visit Emily online at exrpan.com, and find her on
Twitter and Instagram: @exrpan.