Road Trip to NaNo: Why You Need a Writing Back-Up Plan

NaNoWriMo is an international event, and the stories being written every year reflect our hundreds of participating regions. We’re taking a Road Trip to NaNo to hear from our amazing writers all around the world. Today, Adrienne Devine, our Municipal Liaison in the Memphis region helps readers figure out a Plan B to get them through November: 

Memphis, TN. Long thought to be primarily the home of the blues, in addition to some seriously great barbecue and a surprising number of indie creatives. Memphis is one part “We can do this,” another part “Let’s go the alternate route,” and a whole lot of overall “Let’s just do this” attitude. 

If there’s one way to get something done, Memphis and her citizens have probably figured out a different way to get the same result. Memphians are always extremely proud of the fact that we went about doing things a different way…

One of the first things I learned after I moved to Memphis from my birthplace was that, one way or another, people in Memphis could get anything done—be it brewing coffee on the grill during the two week power outage caused by local storm Hurricane Elvis, or always hosting the “Memphis in May” festival come rain or shine.

I personally have bad wrists, and this always causes me problems near the end of the NaNoWriMo. It wasn’t until I looked at the situation from a Memphian point of view that I realized that my nearly 20,000-word deficit going into the last week didn’t mean I was going to lose. There was another way to get those words down without hurting myself. 

I looked around and found Dragon Dictation software, which turned my spoken words into typed, on-screen ones. I then locked myself in my room for the duration of my usual writing time, and—between editing Dragon’s screw-ups and emailing myself little chunks at a time— I made up my deficit that year to win with ten words to spare.

Living in Memphis has taught me to always have a plan of attack. A plan for writing time, a plan for what happens when someone doesn’t respect your writing time, a plan for recovering your word count when distractions go on for too long. Make a plan, then go in and make a second plan. 

One additional suggestion: go find yourself someone in your region that you can get along with. Make friends with them, and when you need some focused writing time, meet up with your new friend to “hang out”—then sprint or word war your way out of the word-count deficit. As any Memphian would tell you, you can do it!

Adrienne Devine, aka HuskersGirlLaura, has been doing NaNoWriMo since 2004. When she finally made the plunge into Memphis’ NaNoWriMo community in 2009, she was hooked: coming to the realization that she wanted to be an ML in order to give back to the organization that took her from ‘sorta-writing’ to actively writing non-stop. With obsessive levels of science fiction and fantasy knowledge she rarely ventures outside her usual genres, but she’s always up to help people in other genres work out the plot holes that they’ve inadvertently written themselves into.

Top photo by Flickr user Jeremy Sorrells