#scrivener's price & learning curve are ungodly but using google docs for nano last year made me want to throw my laptop into the ocean. so.
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Hi, Q! As a big fan of your writing, I'm really curious about your nanowrimo process. Like in terms of what keeps you motivated/validated? Did you set some goal for yourself beforehand that you're trying to achieve (aside from the daily word count)?
I've tried it twice, the first time I was actually posting every day what I wrote the previous night. It wasn't my greatest work by any stretch of the imagination, but at least the process itself was fun, validating and interactive. I've enjoyed it a whole lot. And then the next year I decided that I would spend some actual time and thought on finessing what I wrote, instead of half-assedly editing it during my lunch break, and then I would post the whole thing after the fact. Well, guess what, this fic has never been finished, its 40000 words skeleton is buried in my drafts forever. I cannot even look at it, it makes me physically ill.
I really wanted to try again this year but there seems to be a mental block in my head I cannot break through. What keeps you going? Do you have a self-validation tip for this process that you could share?
first, let me let you in on a secret:
I have been trying to write this fic. for five years. and three NaNoWriMos jsldkjslkj
So I am not necessarily THE best person to give advice about staying motivated with writing projects. But I can say a few things that have been making this year work really, really well for me as opposed to previous years! And this answer got pretty long, but if even one part of it helps, I’ll consider it a success!
So the short answer: 1) making a detailed outline, 2) not editing in November, and 3) a healthy dose of external motivation. The longer answer:
Detailed Outline
If I’ve already lost you, please come back. I promise I hate outlines. I didn’t have an outline for this fic for five years. The outline was a hail mary throw, at least half motivated by panic that the show was going to end and no one would care about the fic by the time I posted it, and I did not expect it to work. But it changed absolutely everything about the writing process for me.
I didn’t realize until after I made myself stop typing scenes and start just figuring out the major beats in a notebook that up until then, what I’d been calling “writing” had actually been two things at once: writing, and planning.
By figuring out the major plot beats, then making a scene-by-scene outline, I got to do all the planning ahead of time. I know which plot points I need to foreshadow and when; I know what’s going to coax the characters two steps forward, and what’s going to send them one step back; I know exactly what the antagonist’s next move is and when they’re going to make it.
I thought I would miss that, and that I’d have no motivation to write once I knew everything that happened, but it turned out to be the opposite. Because by doing the planning ahead of time, I don’t have to multitask anymore, and I have so much more mental space to create. It’s like having all your paints mixed and your canvas primed before you even pick up a brush. You can just focus on the art.
I love being able to pick any scene off my list, in any order, and just let myself have fun writing it. The extra time I have that I’d previously used for utilitarian things like “how does this lead into the next scene” can now be used for fun things like “how can I set this scene up to call back to something that happened the show?”
2. Stop editing
Because actually I lied, before. What I used to do, and what it sounds like you did, wasn’t just two things at once: it was three. Writing, planning, and editing.
You know that little chant from Dune, where they’re like, “I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer”? That’s editing. Editing is the mind killer. By editing as you write, you’re like, reverse-validating yourself. You’re taking yourself out of the creative process to look for everything wrong with your writing and your story.
It’s also a time suck, and NaNoWriMo is a sprint. Editing is what December is for. When you free yourself from both planning and editing—by planning before, and editing after—writing will feel a lot more internally rewarding. You’re just making. You can get it nice for other people to look at, later. The first draft is for you, and specifically the part of you that loves your story. Don’t let the rest of you nitpick it apart yet.
3. External motivation
Here's the other thing: if I don’t update my word count on the NaNoWriMo website every day and keep my streak going, I will stop writing this fic. I wish I were joking.
Even with everything I just said, I need external motivators to actually get me to set a daily hard deadline of midnight to make myself carve time out of the day to write, and write fast. Missing a day last year and losing my streak was the nail in the coffin for that attempt (which had already been dying a slow, painful death, because I’d had no outline, and every day I was just adding another 1.6k of filler into the front half of act 2).
So I recommend using NaNo's website to keep a running word count and streak going, even better if you have add some buddies on there who will at least in theory be seeing whether you update every day or not. (You can add me, if you want! My username is fatherofthebride.)
I also definitely, definitely couldn’t be doing this without two great friends and beta readers, who endure some truly novel-length rants via text as I either talk through problem areas with them or send them excited recaps of a scene I just wrote and am really excited about.
If external validation works for you, but daily posting of the new writing doesn’t, I really recommend grabbing someone to chat to about how the fic is going and share snippets with, and/or posting about how it’s going/posting teaser snippets of the WIP.
And that's the end of the numbered list! I hope there's something at least a little helpful somewhere in here and I also really hope I actually answered your question <3
#also if you want specific recs i like jami gold's romance beat sheet for outlining and scrivener for writing software#scrivener's price & learning curve are ungodly but using google docs for nano last year made me want to throw my laptop into the ocean. so.#nano prep 22
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