In which the lovely Nessie talks to us about NaNo

   Hello blogglings! In preparation for NaNoWriMo next month, I've asked a few seasoned veterans to give us some advice about it. Today's post is from my lovely friend Lily. Show her some appreciation! 

   For some, November means warm scarves, pretty leaves, and pumpkin spice lattes. For those of us with over active imaginations and ink for blood, November means National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Thirty days of mad scribbling, brainstorming, word wars, and caffeine. 

   This year will be my fifth year participating in NaNoWriMo, and my seventh NaNoWriMo event, as I’ve participated in Camp NaNo twice. Over the last five years, I’ve learned a lot about NaNo and writing. Today I’m going to share some of those things with you, things that (I hope) will both encourage you and help you get through any mid-NaNo blues.

• You’re going to learn something.
     You can’t spend 30 days writing your inky heart out without learning something. Maybe it’ll be that you really hate plotting, or that you need to plot more, or that murder mysteries are a lot more fun than you thought. You will learn how much you love writing, how many words you can write in an hour, and how to plow through writing slumps when you have no idea what to write but need 500 more words. These lessons are every bit as valuable as the novel you end up writing.
     Also, your typing skills are about to get 10x better. 

• Sometimes what you write really sucks, and that’s okay.
     One of the goals of NaNo is to just get the story on the page, no matter how stilted your dialogue is or how many inconsistencies there are. You may be questioning this line of reasoning, thinking “Why would I do that? Don’t I want to make it as perfect as possible on the first try?” And yeah, I can see why you would think that, but this exercise is about letting go of the need for perfection. It’s about not letting the need for perfection hold you back from writing the story in your heart. You can always fix problems later. It doesn’t need to be perfect on the first draft. And, sometimes writing with that reckless abandonment that allows the dumbest puns ever and cringe-worthy romancing yields some story gold, like a new character who shows up out of nowhere and becomes one of the best people you’ve ever created (true story, this has happened to me a couple of times).
     There’s a really great quote from Shannon Hale that I want to share here: “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
     Building sand castles is messy. Writing first drafts is messy. That’s okay. You’ll fix it later. “But Lily!” you wail. “Second drafts are scary! I’ll be eaten by a scary editing monster! They have big teeth and eat authors for dessert!”
     Yes, second drafts are scary. But so are first drafts. They’re just scary in different ways. If you can conquer a first draft, you can do a second draft. And, in my experience, second and third drafts are where the magic starts to happen, when things start to come together and you make yourself and your best friend cry with your literary genius (true story).
     So don’t let the fear of writing something that will need editing scare you into a case of Perfectionismitis. Perfectionismitis and its evil sidekick Doubt are known story killers.  

• You may decide halfway through that for you to make this TOTALLY AWESOME SHINY NEW IDEA work, you’re going to have to change EVERYTHING. Or, you know, not EVERYTHING, but VERY NEARLY EVERYTHING. This is also okay.
     Here’s something you learn about writing after you’ve written a couple novels: as you’re writing you have cool new ideas that are even cooler than the cool ideas you started out with. And implementing these cool new ideas means changing things. Changing things is okay. You can totes change things. CASE IN POINT: way back in 2012, I started out writing my NaNoNovel in first person. A couple months later and 60K in, I decided it needed to be in third person. So, I went back and changed the whole thing to third person. Was it a pain? Yeah, a bit. Was it worth it? Oh yes. CASE IN POINT #2: I had this one character, Aunt Trevina. Aunt Trevina was awesome. Aunt Trevina did not belong in the story. So, I had to cut her out of the story. That was not fun. Was the story better off for it, and am I totally going to save her for another story later? Yes. Sometimes the changes you have to make are painful, but they’re worth the feeling of watching this story that’s a part of your soul come together into something even cooler than you first imagined. 

• The NaNoWriMo community is great.
     The NaNoWriMo forums are lots of fun, and a great place to find cool writer friends (true story, I met some of my best friends through NaNoWriMo). They’re chock full of people dealing with the same problems as you are, who you can complain about hard-to-write spots and characters who won’t behave with, and who can offer advice when you need help.
     Also, the NaNoisms (typos) forum is one of the funniest things ever. 

• There’s a good chance that your characters will take over at some point and do their own thing despite the fact that you’ve told them (repeatedly) that they need to follow the plot line.
     There are a couple things you can do in this situation: roll with it (maybe the characters have better ideas than you do), try to fix it (maybe they’re just mischievous idiots and need to be brought back in line), or skip to the next scene and move on.
     And get used to it, because this happens, and sometimes it doesn’t matter how many novels you’ve written or how well you plotted, the characters still take over. If the characters are smarter than you are and have handed you a cool new plot, please refer back to #3 and what I said about cool new ideas.

• There is no “right” way to write a novel.
     I like plotting and talking about my novels with other people because it makes me excited about the story. My best friend is not a plotter and doesn’t talk about her stories with other people because it takes away from her excitement of writing the story. Each person has their own method of writing novels. By participating in NaNo, you’re going to learn what your process is. Maybe you’ll learn because your plotting failed spectacularly. Maybe you’ll learn because your plotting went incredibly well. Whether you learn because something was successful or because it failed, that lesson is still as important as the novel you’re writing. Some techniques or tips or tools will work for you, and others won’t. Thomas Edison learned 10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb. You may learn that two or three tools don’t work for you.  Figuring out how writing novels works for you is an important part of becoming Super Writer Person, and will make the next novel you write easier and better. 

• Try new stuff!
     Has there been a plotting method you want to try out? Or maybe a new genre? Give it a shot! NaNo is a great place to try new ideas and genres out. I’m going to be trying first person again for the first time in years, and I’ll be writing my first true fantasy. 

• It’s okay if you don’t reach the word count goal.
     Yes, you can’t “win” NaNo unless you hit the 50k mark (unless you’re participating in the Young Writers Program, which allows you to set your own goal). But here’s a thing: You’re a winner if you wrote anything at all. Maybe you learned that NaNo isn’t a tool that works for you. That’s okay. I myself will not be shooting for 50k this year because I just don’t have time. But I’m still going to participate and write what I can. The point is that I will have written something.  

   Before I finish off this post, a couple of cool resources you might want to know about:

• The official NaNo wordsprints Twitter (https://twitter.com/NaNoWordSprints) has word wars throughout the day, which can be super fun. (word war (n): an event in which two or more writers write for a specified amount of time and compare word counts afterwards to see who wrote the most. Can be good for the competition, or for just an intense writing sprint.)
• Written? Kitten! http://writtenkitten.net/ This website gives you a new picture of a kitten for every 100/500/whatever-number-you-decide words you write.
• Having a support group of people who are also participating in NaNo is great. 

   And there you have it! Stuff I’ve learned from NaNo. Now, go forth, write, and be awesome!

EDIT:

ANOTHER HELPFUL THING THAT I JUST RECENTLY THOUGHT OF (thanks to the wonderful Maggie Stiefvater) AND WISH I HAD INCLUDED IN THIS POST:

It is okay if you write toward the story instead of the word count. Stiefvater does not like NaNo because it pressures her to write toward a word count goal, and not the story, and that drives her nuts. SO. It is totally okay if you write less than the word count goal because you took the time to think through a scene that will actually benefit the story, instead of writing an extra 500-word scene full of bad puns that you wrote just to reach the word count goal and that you'll end up cutting anyway.

I refer back now to what I said about sucky prose. Sometimes you need to write sucky prose to get through a scene, sometimes you need to write sucky prose just to get writing at all, and sometimes you don't realize your prose is sucky until later, but you don't need to pressure yourself into writing something that is both sucky and also totally pointless just to reach a word count goal. If you're like Stiefvater, that will drive you nuts.

Above all else, have fun. If writing the totally pointless word-count-adding stuff is fun (or you've noticed that sometimes it shakes loose new ideas), then go for it because you totally deserve to have a blast while you write, even if you cut that stuff later. But unless you want the motivation, you don't need to put extra pressure on yourself, especially if extra pressure will result in anxiety that will screw with your productivity.

I guess my final point is this: write the way that works for you. If the basic set up of NaNo works for you, great! If it doesn't but you still want to participate, be a NaNoRebel and do what you want! You have an amazing story waiting inside of you. Tell it the way that works best for you.

   About the author: Lily J. (aka Nessie aka the Lady of Ashes and Ink aka Lily the Ever Morbid) wrote her first story at the age of twelve in an unfruitful attempt at getting out of writing a book report. Despite that plan’s failure, she kept writing the story anyway, and has been writing ever since. You can find her on the interwebs on her (woefully sporadic) blog, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, and NaNoWriMo.