As we approach the final days of National Novel Writing Month, I thought I’d revisit some advice from a few years back, with a few revisions and updates, of course.
If you’ve been working on a novel for NaNoWriMo, you’ll probably be trying to figure out exactly how to stick the landing by the 30th—maybe you know what the ending is, and you just have to get everything locked into place; maybe you’re still trying to figure out the big finish.
Either way, you’ve done a lot of work so far, and you should be proud! But don’t spend too much time congratulating yourself just yet.
I hope that you’ve been finding yourself looking forward to each day’s writing session—not that the work has become any easier, necessarily, but that it’s been easier for you to make the daily decision to block out some time for your writing. Whatever your novel looks like right now, you’ve also been busy proving to yourself that it is possible to develop a writing practice. Ideally, you’ll be able to carry that practice with you into December and beyond.
You may think that you’ve hit upon a pretty good story, and spend your time in the months ahead trying to refine it in additional drafts. But even if you decide that you can’t figure out how to make that story work, and you drop the manuscript in a drawer or a digital folder, you can continue to stick with the writing.
The point isn’t to wake up on December 1st and keep producing 1,000 or more words a day, every day. You don’t need to keep up the NaNoWriMo pace all year long. You probably can’t keep up that pace all year long. The point is that you shouldn’t stop striving to discover what it is you have to share with the world, and you shouldn’t stop learning how to put it into words.
If you’re not working on a manuscript, keep thinking about stories; keep a notebook handy to get the good ideas out of your head and put them in a permanent location where you can pick them up again later. Read a good book!
And then, when you’re ready, you can start writing again. You can even give yourself more than a month on that next project—just keep up the work!