NaNoWriMo 101-Word Count

We are now fully into it.

November, for those of you who don’t know, is National Novel Writing Month and for those of us who don’t care enough about sleep is the perfect opportunity to get 50,000 + words onto a single document.

I already did a post about my personal survival kit for these trying times so I’ll just take you all through the basics of writing a novel in 30 days

Let’s talk Word Count

On the site you have a lovely page called “Stats” where you can see your progress and other fun facts about your writing habits. It looks something like this:

As we manage to keep writing every day the stats will show us our progress, for now have a look at today’s wonderful results (will probably decline as the month goes on…)

Keeping up with your word count is the easiest way to reach such a high goal, you probably can’t imagine writing 50,000 words in one sitting but if you take it in daily bouts of 1,667 words a day it doesn’t look too bad, does it?

Inspiration is weird and you’ll probably have days where no words come to you, my advice would be to still write something, even if it’s garbage. This way you get used to writing and eventually your brain will pick up on that and just produce something.

If that doesn’t work then just don’t, you can take days off whenever you need them and then take advantage of the days you are really inspires to catch back up. Just don’t get too far behind or it’ll be harder to do.

I’m in my last year of college (graduating in December!) so I can’t plan out a story so I’m taking a different approach.

How? Well, I’m doing something called “Just Write” where all the writing I do, be it for the blog, for a class assignment, some fanfics, counts towards my goal. I’m taking part this year so that I can build up a writing habit and then, next year, actually get to do a novel.

Maybe you feel like you aren’t writing because you aren’t adding to a particular project but you are putting effort into something else, so that should count as well!

Whether you are novelling or just writing you are amazing for even trying to do this so don’t feel discouraged if you fall back, just by signing up you are making an incredible effort.

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Let’s be buddies!