Pro Tips from a NaNo Coach: Help! I’m 10,000 Words Behind!

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NaNoWriMo is well under way, and whether you’re at 5,000 words or 50, you may feel like your word count—and your morale—could use a little boost. Today, author and podcaster Mur Lafferty reminds us that NaNo isn’t just about reaching 50K: 

So you started strong, and then fell off. Or something came up. Work happened. Car broke down. Cat got pregnant. Neighbor died. Life happens.

Or, maybe, you JUST found out about NaNoWriMo and thought it was a great idea—but then you looked up, saw it was already November, and are kicking yourself about missing the grand launch.

Oh well. Might as well quit. You can’t possibly catch up. But next year, right? You will totally be there.

Hold on there, camper. Just listen to me for a second.

The stated goal of NaNoWriMo is to make it to 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s what the event is on the surface. But in reality, it’s so much more.

NaNoWriMo gives you permission to write whatever you want, at whatever quality you want. No one cares how good it is; you just need to get some words down. It gets you moving, gets you writing, and moving toward that feeling of accomplishing a heck of a lot of words.

And here’s the deal: whether you write 50,000 words in November, or 5,000, those are words you didn’t have last month.

If you quit now, because you’re behind, or you’re starting late, or you’re discouraged, then there are many words you won’t write just because you feel the event has moved beyond you. Don’t let that stop you!

Confession time: Last year I didn’t hit 50,000 words. I was stressed out because of travel and current events, and only made it to 45,000 words. Some might say AUGH, YOU GOT SO CLOSE! But I didn’t feel regret, or even failure, at all. I wrote 45,000 words that I didn’t have in October, I got a good way into a new project, and I was very proud of myself.

You can move forward with your project if you’re on word 5000, or word 0. Write as much as you can every day. You can be involved with the community, you can go to an event, you can update your word count, you can still participate in NaNoWriMo. If you want to do the math and figure out how you can write 1667 + (missing words / days left) a day, do that. Or you can write 500 words a day and look proudly on those 15,000 words at the end of the month. Fifteen thousand words. That is a solid start to a project that you didn’t have before!

If you quit because you don’t think you’ll get those 50,000, then you won’t even get those 15,000. Or 10,000.

Don’t look at this as an all or nothing, like if you don’t hit 50,000, then you’re a failure. That’s simply not true. Whatever you write today, you will have more words than you had yesterday. And that’s the whole point of this.

I’ll be honest: I’m traveling to a wedding this month, hosting Thanksgiving, going to multiple shows, and doing a daily podcast to support my patrons who are attacking NaNoWriMo themselves. Will I make the 50,000 words? I honestly don’t know. But that uncertainty isn’t going to stop me.

What I do know I will have a lot more words at the end of the month than I have now. And that is a win in my book.

Mur Lafferty is a podcaster, author, and editor. She has two podcasts on writing: I Should Be Writing and Ditch Diggers. In 2017, her book based on ISBW came out, with the same title. When not supporting writers, she co-edits the Podcast magazine Escape Pod and publishes science fiction and fantasy with Orbit Books and Serial Box. Visit her website at murverse.com.

Author Photo by JR Blackwell. 

Nov. 7 2017
#nanowrimo #nanowrimo 2017 #nano coach #nano coaches #mur lafferty #writing #by nano coach
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