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!

The key to winning NaNo is speed. You need to be able to sit down and bang out scene after scene. For me, that means good planning in October. I start with my characters.

I have an idea for my novel this year. It’s a story that I’ve already written about half way through, but I’m going to rework it completely. I have about ten characters already defined but I’m taking a close look at them again to be sure they serve the story I want to tell.

To start the planning process I want to define high-level personalities for my characters. I’m going to use the personality profiles in Character Creation Made Easy as a short-cut to get started. I want a base personality type for each character, major and minor. It gives me a handle on how they’ll react in their scenes. Even the walk-on characters need something to distinguish them from every other character.

For the minor characters, I’ll stop with just a base personality and a small amount of background to explain why they’re in the story and what they want (everybody wants something). For major characters I need more background and most important, motivations and goals for each one. For those, I’ll go back to Character Creation Made Easy as my starting point. Once I have an idea of the base motivation and story goals for each, I’ll switch to the Create a Character Clinic. It does a great job of leading you through a series of questions that explore different aspects of the character’s life – Work & Play, Past, Present & Future, Friends, Enemies & Lovers, Life & Death, Culture, Religion & Education, and Moral Stance. Working through some of the questions in each section gives me great detail on my major characters. I can then use the material for plot ideas also, but we’ll cover that in the next post.

So, to prepare for NaNo, start with your characters. Get a good handle on them so you know what they want and how they’ll react when you throw alligators and obstacles at them.

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!

It’s time for NaNo again! National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo or NaNo) is a yearly event where writers strive to write 50,000 words in just 30 days. It occurs each November and 2008 is the tenth anniversary for NaNo.

NaNo was started by Chris Baty and a few of his friends. They got the crazy idea that they wanted to each write a book. They needed a way to determine that they had succeeded, so Chris pulled the shortest novel that he could find off his bookshelf and counted the words. It was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and it was 50,000 words.

The best part about NaNo is being a part of a huge writing effort. You and 25,000 other writers, all around the world, banging out novels in the space of a month. There are regional groups that sponsor “write-ins” for “WriMos” (people participating in NaNo) in local areas. They meet in coffee shops, restaurants, libraries and just write. There’s something exciting about being surrounded by other writers typing madly on laptops, Alphasmarts or writing longhand.

You can sign up to participate in NaNo at their website, www.nanowrimo.org. It’s totally free. I’ll be participating as well. Got a science fiction novel that has been bugging me to get written. You can follow my progress by adding me as a Writing Buddy. My profile is here. Or follow me on Twitter as I’ll be reporting my progress there, as well.

50,000 words in just 30 days may seem impossible. Sure, it’s short for a novel, but a lot of words to kick out in just a month. You’d certainly have to drop every other activity in your life just to have the time to write that many words. Right? Wrong. 50,000 words in 30 days is just 1,667 words a day. You can write 1,667 words each day easily, if you are properly prepared for the challenge.

From now until the first of November, I’ll have some tips for you to help you get prepared and send your word count soaring. Sign up for NaNo today!