Pro Tips from a NaNo Coach: How I Wrote My Novel in Six Weeks

NaNoWriMo can seem like a daunting task sometimes, for NaNo newbies and veterans alike. Fortunately, our NaNo Coaches are here to help guide you through November! Today, author Vera Kurian is here to share some tips for meeting your goal this month:

My debut novel Never Saw Me Coming came out a couple months ago, and while it was not a NaNo project, I did write it very fast over a period of about six weeks. I will preface this by saying writing faster isn’t necessarily better but if you are here, I’m guessing you’re someone who has enjoyed the frenzied feeling that disappearing into a piece of work can create. 

My not-so-secret secret is that I am a huge, ardent, passionate believer in both outlining and having a specific task in mind when I sit down to write. I’ve realized over the years that this a good match for my lifestyle: I have a full-time career, an active social life, a dog that needs walking, and I go to the gym a lot. In other words, I don’t have a lot of time to waste. Whether it’s a short story or a novel, I usually have a sense of most of the plot before I begin. 

If you think of “writing” as the part where you are sitting down and typing, I think that’s a bit wrong. Because before that, I’m doing a lot of thinking, and during that thinking I’m both fleshing out characters and laying down the foundational notions of plot. You would not build a building without first having the structural girders that bear the weight. Once I have those, I know where I’m going—I have a blue print that I just have to follow along. (If this seems like late advice for NaNo near the end of the month, I don’t think it is: writing down plot summaries or detailed character sketches should fairly count in your word counts IMHO.)

This is not to say that everything is set in stone before I get going. Maybe only 70 or 80 percent of the plot is worked out, and often the final bits of character hit me when I’m actually typing, and all of these things get refined in revision. But ultimately, my free time is limited and I’m not going to waste it with rewrite after rewrite or having no idea of what I’m doing during my writing session. 

A huge percentage of my first draft was specifically written between 6 and 7 pm on weeknights because this is after dinner, but before I head to the gym. This was the only time I would have, and I was not willing to put off the gym if I was “on a roll” which meant that I tended to be typing fast during that hour, because it would be the only time I would have. Contrary to the belief held by many that you need huge chunks of uninterrupted time to write a novel, I might propose the opposite: that restricted time is treated as more valuable because of its scarcity. For me, what more proof do I need than the vast stretches of 2020 I spent at home, not working, doing no writing at all? 

Vera Kurian is a writer and scientist based in Washington DC.  Her debut novel, NEVER SAW ME COMING, was published by Park Row Books (US) and Harvill Secker, Vintage (UK) in September 2021. Her short fiction has been published in magazines such as Glimmer Train, Day One, and The Pinch. She has a PhD in Social Psychology, where she studied intergroup relations, ideology, and quantitative methods. You can find her at verakurian.com or @vera_kurian on Twitter.