6 Things to know before you NaNoWriMo

How to start—and end—the month of November with something solid you can work from instead of a traffic jam of words. (Plus general writing tips for everyone else!)

Today marks the beginning of November, which means it’s the end of Decorative Gourd Season and the start of #NaNoWriMo, the “National Novel Writing Month” that represents a coming together of people on the Internet who are going to try to write (or finish) a novel in a month. According to Wikipedia, NaNoWriMo started in 1999 with 21 registered participants. By 2019, there were half a million writers participating. Today—I don’t have the numbers—but it feels safe to say that there are more than that.

Broad strokes: NaNoWriMo brings tons of writers together for a common goal, infusing excitement and sociability into an often lonely (and sedentary) profession. It’s a fantastic feeling to work incredibly hard at something for a month with an Olympian output of energy and drive.

That’s the upside. The downside is that December finds thousands of writers sitting on a first draft that they worked so hard on they equate sweat equity with the manuscript being finished, which it isn’t, which it won’t be for quite some time. But when you’re in the throes of NaNoWriMo, you can’t see that you are sitting on a rough draft, you think you’re on a goldmine because your NaNo friends have been cheering you on and you’ve been cheering them on, and the result of this legitimate goodwill and positive energy is that come December, literary agents around the world are inundated with half-baked manuscripts slushing up their slush pile. (Which is an argument for not submitting to agents in December, and also a reminder not to submit work that isn’t ready—a harder rule to follow!)

I am all in for the good vibes behind NaNoWriMo. It’s a great movement that allows writers to experience what it’s like to work frenetically on deadline.

But NaNoWriMo can harm—not help—if you don’t begin with a few guidelines to keep you on track while you are working.

If you give into the NaNo frenzy without a gameplan, you’re going to end up with 50K+ words that you have to restructure and revise to such an extent that you’ll basically be starting the entire project over again.

So here’s how to NaNoWriMo with an emphasis on quality instead of output:

Legend has it this is the oldest living NaNoWriMo manuscript in the modern world is here photographed by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

1. Know your destination before you start the car

Listen, I love writing to find the story as much as the next person, but if you are going to set aside a month to work incredibly hard on something, you’re going to need buffers installed to keep your ass on track. After all, NaNoWriMo is worth it when you enter December with something solid you can work from, build on, and eventually submit. If November’s efforts leave you with a steaming pile of garbage that you have to disinfect, than you’re going to end the month in a worse place than where you started from, with more revision to do instead of less.

I don’t like outlines when I’m starting something new (again, I really am the kind of person who writes to find the writing) but they’re a great tool when it comes to NaNoWriMo. There are tons of ways to outline, but for pure efficiency, I like the traditional three-act structure that screenwriters still use to draft material (and executives still use to decide whether or not to acquire a project). Taken from a talk I gave last year, that three-act structure looks like this: