NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: Remember Your Writing Journey is Just Beginning

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Joanna Penn from The Creative Penn tackles ‘R’ — Remember Where You Are:

S – Size Up the Situation
U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
R – Remember Where You Are
V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
I – Improvise
V – Value Living
A – Act Like the Natives
L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

I took part in my first NaNoWriMo when I was an avid reader but didn’t have much of a clue about writing fiction. I ‘failed’ that year, but from that mess came the seed of my first novel, Pentecost. Fast forward a few years and I’ve sold over 55,000 copies of my first three books, and have just finished my fourth novel, which I started during NaNoWriMo last year. 

Your writing life will change over time, but if you’re just starting out, here’s where you are right now: 

You’re amongst friends.

The writing community at NaNoWriMo and beyond is amazingly supportive, and you will find friends along the way who understand your weirdness and the dark words that come from within, your sense of humor and the quirky characters you create. 

Here you will find people who understand how hard writing actually is, and who will support you on your journey even if it’s through a tweet. As you develop over time, you will find peers with whom you can learn the craft, swap and edit work, or even form writing partnerships. 

You’re in an environment for learning. Failure is OK.

The advice that helped me start writing fiction was: “It’s OK to suck”. There is a great myth that the best books arrive fully formed in perfect sentences on the page. The truth is that the best books get to their place through a lot of editing, and that first draft material is exactly that: material to be worked into something marvelous. 

Your task this month is all about learning as you write, and challenging yourself to venture a little further outside your comfort zone. It’s important to experiment and not worry about any kind of perceived failure. This is a safe space, so use it to break through any blocks you have about what you can write.  

You’re at the beginning of the rest of your writing life. 

This is the big picture: each book you write, or short story, or screenplay, or any kind of creative product is an intellectual property asset with value that will last for the rest of your life. That’s an exciting future! 

You might think you’re a long way from that right now, but remember that you’re just at the beginning so there’s time to achieve some great milestones. To make it that far, you will have to put in tiny, incremental steps—like writing 100 words a day, or 1500 words a day, or whatever you commit to. Like reading in the genre you love or learning more about the craft. 

So remember where you are right now, but also think about where you want to be and then take some concrete steps this month to get there! 

Joanna Penn is the author of the ARKANE thrillers Pentecost, Prophecy and Exodus. Joanna’s site for writers, The Creative Penn, has been voted one of the Top 10 blogs for writers, and offers articles, audio and video on writing, publishing and book marketing. Connect with Joanna on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user mollyjolly.