As the final post in our series on preparing for NaNo (National Novel Writing Month), how could we overlook the ultimate prep tools for NaNo… Chris Baty’s own books – No Plot? No Problem! and No Plot? No Problem! Novel-Writing Kit. Chris Baty, for those new to NaNo, is the founder of NaNo and he’s written these two books to help you through the NaNo (or any other fast-writing) experience. The best part of these two books is Baty’s sense of humor. His writing is exuberant and over-the-top, perfect for ramping up to start a new novel.

No Plot? No Problem!
Section One of the book covers several vital elements for NaNo:

• the proper mindset for starting NaNo – a willingness to write something crappy
• getting motivated by your loved ones – through guilt or terror
• sustaining yourself through 50,000 words – restaurant meals are essential
• planning your novel with two lists – things you love in novels and things that bore or depress you in novels

Section Two has a chapter for each of the four weeks you’ll be writing and a final one on what to do when your novel is finished. I’ve written a review of the book that you can read here.

No Plot? No Problem! Novel-Writing Kit
The kit is not a duplicate of the original book with a few more doodads. It contains a condensed version of No Plot? No Problem! Just the essentials in 42 pages versus 172. But the kit is long on Rah-Rah, feel-good items:

• a Novelist Affidavit for committing your intention to paper
• commitment coupons for you to fill out – “I promise to (insert awful chore here) if I fail to write (insert # of words) by (insert date).
• inspirational cards for each of the 31 days
• “Ask Me About My Novel!” stickers
• a monthly calendar for recording your daily word count goals and progress with gold star stickers
• a sealed “I Quit” envelope – you DON’T want to open it
• a Novelist! pin that you can wear to announce your victory

Just looking through the package is fun. If you know a writer who could use lots of encouragement, like a younger writer or a first-time writer, the Novel-Writing Kit provides enough structure and instruction without feeling overwhelming along with plenty of encouragement.

For the more serious writer, the original book, No Plot? No Problem!, is the better choice. There’s a lot more meat about getting started and maintaining your momentum all the way to the end.

And this is the end of our series on preparing for NaNo. It starts in two days and I’m excited to get going on my story. Hope I’ll see you around the NaNo site!

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!

So after all this prep work are you still undecided about participating in NaNo (National Novel Writing Month)? Does it seem a little daunting? No worries. Lazette Gifford has put together a booklet on NaNo with the permission of Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo. It’s entitled NaNo for the New and the Insane: A NaNoWriMo Survival Guide and it contains everything you need to know for a fun (and successful!) NaNo experience.

It is 131 pages of tips for NaNo, including sections on Preparing for NaNo; Forums, Blogs and Websites; The Actual Writing; Keep Writing to the End; The After NaNo Blues; and Just for Fun. There is a lot of great information in the book and you’ll be expertly prepared for NaNo.

It’s a free download and can be shared with your friends. Get your copy today!

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!

When participating in NaNo (National Novel Writing Month), you’ll probably need some tools to get your novel written. While you can write your 50,000 words in longhand (and some writers do, believe it or not), that can be quite a challenge. And if you want to have your word count validated by the official NaNo Word Count Validator at the end of November, you’ll need it in electronic format, so you can upload it to the NaNo site.

So here are a few electronic tools you can use to write your novel.

yWriter
This little writing program is marvelous. I use it myself and love it. It lets you set up chapters and scenes within the chapters, has a place for character information, including the viewpoint character for each scene, keeps a running word count for you and allows you to export your novel easily to a word processing document. It’s a self-contained program so you can run it on a flash drive. Best of all, it’s free. You can get more details on it here and also download it from that location. I highly recommend it.

Notepad
Don’t have any of the expensive word processing programs? Try using Notepad. It’s standard with Windows and works pretty well as just a text editor. There aren’t any fancy features to distract you from writing your story (definitely important for NaNo). You can save your novel as a text file and then open your text file in any other word processing program to format it for submission to an agent or editor. Free and easy to use.

Alphasmart
Don’t have a laptop? An Alphasmart might be the gadget for you. It’s basically a portable keyboard with a small digital screen that allows you to see about four lines of text. It’s battery powered and has memory built in so it saves your typed words. You can transfer the file to your computer via a PS/2 or USB cable and some models even have infrared capability so the transfer can be wireless. Portable, durable and again, no fancy features to distract you from your novel writing. You can read more about the Alphasmarts here and can usually find them available on Amazon or eBay for a good price.

You can find more information on tools to use in the NaNo forums. There’s an entire board devoted to NaNo Technology.

When selecting your tools for NaNo, remember that you need something that allows you to type quickly and has minimal distractions. Beyond that, anything goes!

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!

Just got back from the Des Moines region NaNo Kickoff Party. What a blast! Great to meet some of the folks who will be participating in NaNo around Des Moines.

For the Des Moines WriMos (and anyone else who wants a copy), here’s the Excel spreadsheet ( 2008_nano_progress_chart ) that Mary mentioned. You can download it and use it for tracking your NaNo progress.

Today’s tips are designed to help you have fun with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

Forget the Rules
Participating in NaNo can be a great rush. You are free from all the conventions of good writing. Want to include backstory? Go ahead. Want to write the entire thing in as action with no dialogue? Why not? What about including flashbacks or a prologue? Do it. NaNo requires you to write swiftly and regularly to meet the goal of 50,000 words. You can’t do that if you are constrained by how you are “supposed” to write. Allow yourself to write any way you want to and just get the words down.

Still bothered by writing bad prose? Remember, a written piece can always be improved, but not if you never get around to writing it. NaNo helps you finish your story in a very short time period. You can then edit at your leisure and refine it into a saleable piece of work. Focus on finishing the novel first. And enjoy the tremendous feeling of accomplishment at the end of November when you can proudly say, “I wrote 50,000 words in just 30 days.”

Bring in the Plot Ninjas
What if you get stuck while writing? Writer’s block can strike at the strangest times and November is a BAD time to get writer’s block. If you get stuck, just bring in the Plot Ninjas. Literally. Have a group of ninjas in full regalia drop from the ceiling into the middle of your story and start attacking people. What would your characters do? Maybe they fight back, maybe they run away, maybe they break out snacks and invite the ninjas to watch a movie. No matter what they do in response to the ninjas, they will give you something to write about and no more writer’s block.

If ninjas don’t fit in your story, have a different unexpected event happen. Maybe the doorbell rings and a rodeo clown busts into the room and starts twisting up mutant balloon animals. If you’re writing a historical novel, maybe a rival clan, outlaw gang or raiding party suddenly starts shooting, slashing or pillaging. A thriller? Have something explode and kill a major character. Make the event unexpected, shocking, even ridiculous, and your writer’s block doesn’t stand a chance.

Go Local
NaNo is infinitely more fun when done with other people. Check the NaNo forums for your region and see if there is a kickoff party planned and write-ins through the month. Communal novel writing is a blast as you type along with 3, 8 or 20 other people. If there isn’t a local group in your area, get together with your writing friends or group or hang out with other WriMos online. Forward Motion, an online writing community, usually has a NaNo chat room going for write-ins. There are a large number of WriMos on Twitter who will be reporting their progress as they write. (Check out the Followers list.)

Tomorrow we’ll talk about some of the tools that you can use for NaNo.

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!

Finally got the upload problems fixed and here is the Excel spreadsheet ( 2008_nano_progress_chart ) you can download and use for tracking your NaNo progress.

Okay, you’re set with characters, some scenes to write, a great mindset and the willingness to pad your word count as needed for NaNo (National Novel Writing Month). The next step is to train yourself to write fast.

Use a Timer
It’s November 1. You’re ready to begin writing. Set a timer for five minutes. Visualize your scene in your mind, the action that is going to happen next in your story. Can you see it? Start the timer and begin typing as fast as you can. Forget about misspellings or proper grammar, just type. Get as much written as you can before the timer goes off.

How much can you write in five minutes? If I’m writing dialogue, I can get up to 250 words done in five minutes. Straight action scenes or a character’s thoughts? Up to 400 words in five minutes. Everyone can find five minutes here and there during the day to write, so this is a great strategy to use for getting your daily words done.

Have a Write-Off
A write-off is a challenge to see who can write the most words in a specified time period. When you do a write-off with friends, you can really motivate yourself to crank out the words. You can hold write-offs with your friends in person, via instant messages, chat rooms, even on Twitter.

First agree on a time frame, say 20 minutes. Then each person starts their 20 minutes when they’re ready and tracks the time on their own. When the time is up, each person posts their word count for those 20 minutes. The highest word count, “wins” the write-off.

Keep Track of Your Progress
Tracking your daily progress can give you great motivation to keep pushing toward your daily goal. I use an Excel spreadsheet that was designed for NaNo to track my daily progress. I enter in my total word count each day and the number of minutes I spent writing. It then calculates my average number of words per hour, average per day, how many words I have left to finish, how many hours it will take me to reach 50,000 based on my speed and what day I can expect to be done. There is even a graph to visually show my progress.

If you don’t have Excel, keep track in a notebook or a document. Track your time spent and the words you’ve written. Seeing your words increase each day can be the push you need to keep going. If you’d like a copy of the Excel spreadsheet, you can get it here – 2008_nano_progress_chart.

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!

For Day 4 in your preparation for NaNo (National Novel Writing Month), I have some tips that you can use while you are actually writing. These three tips focus on increasing your word count. They are useful if you’re having trouble making your word count each day.

Forget Contractions
Using contractions is a natural part of writing. It’s how we talk, but for the duration of NaNo, contractions are your enemy. They take two words and shorten them into one. If you’re short on your word count for the day, use the Find/Replace feature in your word processor to root out all the instances of I’m, don’t, can’t, won’t and change them to I am, do not, can not, will not. Scan through what you have written to locate other contractions and replace those too.

Describe Everything
Popular writing wisdom says ‘Don’t have your character look into a mirror and recite every detail of his or her appearance’ because that is a clichéd way to work in character description. NaNo wisdom says, “Describe everything.” Use the mirror trick to describe your character. Have a character look into his or her closet and expound on the exact contents (and what he thinks of every single piece of clothing). Every setting from bedroom to office to school to city park or wilderness can be described in infinite detail down to the smallest blade of grass or paperclip. Meticulous descriptions can add hundreds of words to your novel.

Include Realistic Dialogue
Listen to any conversation around you. It will be peppered with repeated words (“So, like, I went to the mall and he so wasn’t there, like I even care.”), nonsense words (Uh, um, huh) and rambling storytelling (“It went like this, but first I have to tell you, oh and remind me to tell you about the meeting, so we were standing there and to make a long story short…”). Include every single word that is said in a conversation. It may make for difficult reading of the story, but it makes your word count climb.

Now, you might cringe at the idea of inflating your word count with these methods, but keep your mind on the goal… getting your 50,000 words done. It is important for you to complete your 1,667 words each day. If you get behind, it is discouraging and really hard to catch up. You don’t want to find yourself nearing the end of November with 20,000 words to go. Your best strategy is to write 1,667 words each day. And if you’re having trouble getting them done, these tips can help you achieve your daily goal.

Next up, tips on how you can write faster and get you daily word count done in a jiffy.

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!

Continuing on with our preparation for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I’ve got some tips to help you succeed.

Change Your Mindset
The main factor in succeeding for NaNo is your mindset. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words on a brand-new project. Take note that the goal is NOT 50,000 perfect words that create an instant best-seller novel. No, the goal is 50,000 words only. Throw perfection and quality out the door. You are going for quantity alone.

This is a hard concept for a lot of writers. You don’t want to write dreck. You struggle to find the right words, the best words when you write. You don’t intentionally write poorly. (Though it sometime seems that way when you stop to re-read your efforts.)

But for NaNo, you need to be able to write with speed, especially if you have a busy life and limited free time to get your 1,667 words written each day. Speed means not being afraid of writing poorly. Let yourself write poorly, just get the words down on the page.

No Editing!
As writers know, a blank page is useless. You need words on the page to begin revising to make your story the best it can be. NaNo is a great opportunity to complete a raw, rough draft of your novel (or most of your novel since 50,000 words is a pretty short novel).

Your goal is to get the 50,000 words done. You can’t do that if you tinker with what you have already written to phrase it just a little bit better. Keep reminding yourself the goal is to get to 50,000. You can edit as much as you want AFTER you are finished. Just get the story written!

Next up, more tips to help you reach 50,000!

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!

The next step in getting ready for speedy NaNo-writing is to work out a plot. You need to know exactly what you’re going to write when you sit down, so plot work is essential. There are a few tools I use when starting to plot.

Core Need/Inner Wound
A good place to start plotting is with the goal of your character. For assistance, I use the Core Need/Inner Wound section of Character Creation Made Easy. It walks you through determining a core need and inner wound for the character and then takes it two steps further into outer goals and inner goals. Once you know the goals for your character, you can determine ways to thwart those goals, and thereby create scenes for your novel.

Create a Plot Clinic
This book provides you with 20 plot tools and a notecarding method you can use to sketch out scenes. It also gives a great explanation of several different plot structures. I think for my NaNo novel, I’m going to use the Cliffhanger Structure.

Plot Outline Mini-Course
This is a seven lesson email course that I just loved, especially the idea of using common conflicts as ideas for plot scene starters. I’m definitely throwing a few of those into my novel.

Snowflake Plotting Method
Randy Ingermanson put this plotting method together. It starts out with the very essence of your story, a one-sentence description of it, and it builds to a complete synopsis.

Synergy
This is a post by Paperback Writer on how to write a synopsis and it has some great links to several synopsis resources on the web.

Whatever method you go with, creating an initial plot for your novel will make it easier to write during November.

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!