NaNoWri...Me?

Oh, NaNoWriMo.

A magical creation

But also the bane of my existence.

What the-

No!

Not that bane.

The BANE.

Just-

GET OUT OF HERE BATMAN.

This is MY blog.

I learned about NaNoWriMo from one of my lovely close friends in college, so I decided to do it on a whim.

I thought it was completely impossible.

Fifty-thousand words....

In thirty days?!?!?!

Pfft, yeah right.

But I sat down, on November first after only writing one full novel before. One of my biggest tips:

Plan ahead!!!

I did not plan ahead that much, and had no idea where my novel was going.

This was a bad idea.

One tip....that I really need to be better at following.

Something great I learned in a college screenwriting class, was the art of planning. A fantastic thing we did was plan.

A lot.

We had grids

And post it notes on walls.

  

But most of all-we have beat sheets. Beat sheets, beat sheets, and more beat sheets.

What's a beat sheet? Well, I'm planning on writing a post about it very very soon :)

I'm a serious planner in so many aspects of my life....but not writing. It's so annoying and I am trying to change that. In my first novel, I hit the climax of the novel before I was even half way through, because honestly, I had no idea what I was doing, so I basically had to go back and redo my whole novel.

Not fun.

But by planning ahead for NaNoWriMo, you do the hard part for yourself, so you can just write. For NaNoWriMo, you are allowed to do as much planning as you like before the actual month, as long as you do not start writing until midnight November first. By filling out this beat sheet, you can fill out scene by scene and then expand on it when you start writing.

Another tip is to follow NaNoWriMo on twitter, because they do fantastic writing sprints and brain storms to help you hit your daily word goal. You should aim for ~2,000 words a day, which is way less than it sounds, I promise. Even if you don't feel like writing that day, still write. For reference-this blog post is already roughly 475 words. See, it's not as bad as it sounds.

Even if you don't want to write, write! When stuck in a writer's block just keep writing. Even if you think it sounds dumb, or bad, keep writing.

Although NaNoWriMo is not for quite a few months, it is currently the middle of Camp NaNoWriMo. I have not participated in it, but I believe it is similar to NaNoWriMo.

If you are currently in Camp NaNoWriMo, I applaud you. You are more than halfway through, and by the end, you will have a novel done.

I never thought I would, but I wrote over 50,000 words in thirty days.

I am planning on doing a post on my experience in screenwriting, please let me know if you have any questions/anything you would like me to discuss!

~The Whimsical Writer
Please let me know if there is anything you would like me to talk about in anything of the realm of writing. Happy typing!

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