As some of you may know, next month is “National Novel Writing Month.” NaNoWriMo is a writing challenge that takes place every November, encouraging you to write a novel in one month.
I’m very tempted to try it out myself, but I’m not sure that I can crank out a novel in only one month. Have any of you done it before? Or are interested in trying it out?
Had no idea such event took place. If anything I could suggest to my friends who do writing. 
sounds like fun.
I always do, yeah.
It’s helped me get into a routine of writing every day no matter what. Today was my 471st day of writing in a row and I’m averaging 1400 words a day. It was participating in NaNo that helped me learn the discipline to do that.
Wow–I am utterly impressed! 1400 words a day?!
Do you have any tips or secrets to share that help you get into the habit of writing so frequently and for so long?
1400 words a day is really impressive, but even if you can’t make that number, there’s a real power in doing a little bit every day, over time.
At the start of the year I challenged myself to read a screenplay a week and write two scenes a week. By the end of the year I’ve read dozens of scripts and will have written the equivalent of two feature length screenplays…it adds up!
I think NaNo helped get me into the habit to start. Then part of it was keeping track of how often I was writing. It helped me understand how much I was capable of and how much I can push myself when I need to.
Another part of it is to set deadlines: from editors, from patreon, and even myself.
Another thing was to dedicate time and not feel bad if I couldn’t write during the time. That 1400 words a day average is me dividing my word count for the whole streak by the number of days in it. I guarantee, there have been days where I’ve written less than 50 words and days I’ve written 6000. But seeing it add up together in data form makes me feel not bad about the low days and great about the good ones.
I fully intended to use NaNoWriMo to draft out my graphic novel last November, but I ended up writin’ almost nothing but fanfics. embarrassed 50,000 words was no problem at all, although I bounced around from project to project.
I am kind of considering opening up a one month “spoiler alert” reward tier for November to allow people to beta read my progress and to help keep me on the right track. I’ll have to ask my patrons if that’s somethin’ they’d be interested in seeing.
The blog for a month challenge about killed me, afraid what a novel in a month deadline would do to my nervous system.
hahah I feel you, James! I don’t think I’m going to attempt to write a novel in a month and instead utilize the month to simply focus on writing every day. We shall see…
That’s so cool that you still were able to get out a lot of content! I’m not sure that I’ll write a novel in November, but at least spend the time focusing on some sort of creative writing project.
Love the spoiler alert idea for rewards! Also, look out for the ability to add polls to your posts in the coming months–that should help you with gathering feedback from your patrons. 
So excited to hear about the polls! I think that will be a better way for me to get feedback from patrons than my wordy requests.
Best of luck with your writing. It’s fun to participate even if you don’t hit the 50K word mark. It definitely pushes you to find time to be creative.
I do all my first drafts during NaNo. It helps get that internal editor out of the way 
I’m doing it for the first time this year! I’m all signed up on the website and have some other friends who are doing it who I’m hoping will keep me accountable. If anyone wants to be buddies, I’m laurenshippen on the site too!
I love this idea! It’s so important to at least get something written.
Ditto, Lauren! Would love to hear how it goes for you.
Does anyone know if there’s any news yet on when a polls function might appear?
Hey Gareth, looks like you put this question in a topic about NaNoWriMo. You’ll want to make sure to create a new topic if your question isn’t related to the thread.
To be honest with you, this is something that should be directed to our support team (rather than the community). That said, I can tell you that polls will be launched in the coming weeks.
Apologies, Ellie. I did a search, and the thread mentioned the possibility of polls, so I tagged in - sorry, bit of a tangent.
That’s good news, then!
No worries at all!
Happy Monday!!
how’s the nanowrimo going, folks?
I’m caught up on day 4, working on day 5 … haven’t figured out how to talk to my patreon folks about it yet though. I probably won’t do my usual 5x posts monthly, and my patreon is set up per thing, so that means figuring out how to do nano and still get paid.
what are y’all doing to integrate nanowrimo + patreon?