A NaNoWriMo Hack: Sprint Your Way to Writing Success

Need a quick NaNoWriMo hack? We’ve asked our Municipal Liaisons to offer their best tip for November success. First up? Northeast New Jersey’s Hillary DePiano:

No time to write between job, kids, school, rooftop patrols, you say? Don’t worry about finding some big chunk of time to work on your novel. It doesn’t exist. Instead, whenever you have a spare minute, set a timer and write as much as you can until the time is up. Take a break. Repeat. That’s it.

Let me lay at little math on you:

My Wrimos average 550 words in a 15-minute sprint.
That means you could write the entire 50,000 words in about three 15-minute sprints a day (less than an hour!).
That’s under 23 hours total.

And that’s the average. I have personally hit 2,000+ words in a 15-minute sprint and I’m not the fastest typist.

Even if it takes you double the sprints to finish, that’s still just finding half a dozen little moments in your day, not some mythical stretch of uninterrupted time. And the more you do short sprints like this: the faster you’ll write, the easier it will be to pick the story back up where you left it without all the dithering, and the more you’ll realize you’ve actually got the time to write a novel after all.

Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction author best known for her bestselling adaptation of Carlo Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges, which has been performed in both full length and one-act form in theatres around the world, and as the non-fiction and e-commerce author known as The Whine Seller. Since 2010, Hillary has served as ML for Northeast New Jersey for NaNoWriMo. She also ML-ed two Script Frenzy regions before it’s untimely demise.

Top photo by Flickr user Sean MacEntee.