Five Tips for NaNoWriMo: Week One

Our executive director Grant Faulkner shares his five tips to get through the first full week of November:

Studies to discover the key ingredients of NaNoWriMo success have been conducted by data scientists, wizards, alchemists, two plumbers from just outside of Cleveland, one rodeo rider, and a winemaker from Tours, France.

In our endless search to find the recipe for success, we’ve concluded that because everyone is different, there is no one formula to cross the finish line. The main thing is to keep trying new approaches, so here’s the magic NaNo recipe that works for me.

NUMBER ONE: Write your story. 

This is perhaps the most important tip for NaNoWriMo success (and a hat tip to my new writing buddy Hailey for emphasizing this to me at a write-in last week).

As Hailey put it, “Don’t worry about what’s marketable, don’t compare your story to others, just write the story that’s in your heart.”

Telling your novel in the way you want to tell it is what matters the most. If you do that, the passion you feel for it can be as powerful as Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstopper.

NUMBER TWO: Experiment (which also means have fun).

Writing with abandon is also an invitation to be playful, wild, and downright wacky. How to be fun-loving in the duress of such a writing endurance test?

I recommend donning a writing hat to remind yourself of the whimsical powers at your disposal, participating in some NaNo Word Sprints, and giving the Young Writers Program’s Dare Machine a spin or two. 

NUMBER THREE: Get a dog who will force you to take walks.

A dog clamoring for a walk can seem like an interruption at a crucial juncture, but dogs have a preternatural instinct to know when you need to get the blood flowing in your body. Or so my dog Buster tells me.

There’s nothing like a dog walk (or your version of a dog walk if you can’t get or borrow a dog) to welcome in unexpected imaginative insights and ward off back spasms. 

NUMBER FOUR: Practice the art of letting go.

No one can do everything. If you’re going to write a novel in a month, you have to let go of things. Maybe you have to let go of a clean house. Maybe you have to let go of social engagements. The house can be cleaned in December, and good friends will wait until then, too.

NUMBER FIVE: Practice the art of not letting go. 

It’s easy to talk yourself out of any creative project—you might get sick during November, win the lottery, lose your favorite pen, or fall in love. Whether you have good luck or bad luck, you committed to writing a novel. Even if you fall behind and can’t hit the 50K mark, it’s important to hold on tenaciously to one thing: you are a writer, and writers write. Keep showing up.

What tips do you have? I’d love to hear yours to help get me through those inevitable moments when I hit the wall and can’t see a way forward (it always happens).

— Grant Faulkner, executive director