Taking on a challenge like writing a novel can seem daunting. A good novel can range from 60,000 words for a young adult novel or a romance up to 360,000 word for a fantasy novel, with a typical length closer to 90,000 to 120,000 words. For perspective, a paragraph in a five-paragraph essay can be 100 words, so a 100,000 word novel like my first novel, FROST MOON, is like a thousand-paragraph essay. To someone who had trouble getting those 500 words down, that’s incredibly daunting.

Challenges like National Novel Writing Month can, paradoxically, make it easier. 50,000 words in a month seems daunting, but that’s only half a full-length novel, and even more so, it’s not 50,000 words of a finished novel: it’s 50,000 words of unpolished first draft. You can let yourself write drek you’re not proud of if it gets words on the page. If you’re the kind of person daunted by the thought of writing a whole novel, or paralyzed by perfectionism, National Novel Writing Month offers an easier path up the hill.

Still, it’s a long hill. And it can be daunting, no doubt. Especially if you tend to get behind, like I do, or if you tend to get trapped polishing your words, as I often do. You sometimes need tips and techniques to help yourself get past the stumbling blocks.

Here are a few of the ones that have worked for me in the past.

• Commit to Writing Every Day. This is really hard to do, so you need to make sure you do it. You’ll fail, of course, but if you’re constantly writing every day, then missing a day won’t hurt you. If you’re not writing every day, however, soon, you’ll be a week behind, with no way to come back.
• Track Your Progress. If you don’t track your progress, you can find yourself far off the path. I use a spreadsheet which tells me how far ahead (or, more often, behind) I am and how many words I need to write each day to stay on track for the end of the month. Other people use the National Novel Writing Month site to track this.
• Put Writing First. Turn off your Internet until you’ve written. Put off that computer game. Defer going to see that movie until the end of the month. For me, since I read and write over lunch, dinner, and coffee, I have to shut off my internet and defer reading the next scientific paper in my stack until I’ve gotten my word count for the day (with the exception of when my food actually is hot on the plate; I’ll read then as it’s hard to write and eat at the same time).
• Don’t Edit - Just Write. Editing can come later. It’s not adding words to your document. Get your first draft down, then edit it, or you won’t get your 50,000 words in the month, and if you can’t get through 50,000 words without getting bogged down in edits, you’ll never get your 100,000 word novel done.
• Don’t Delete - Use Strikethrough. Don’t cut words during Nano, that’s just shooting yourself in the foot. The point is to get through your whole story. If you don’t like something you wrote, strike it out, put it in italics, whatever, just mark it for future revision and write what you want instead as the next paragraph. Trust me, your inner editor can turn on your new idea just as easily as it can turn on your old - so get them both down and move on. I use a special style in Word called “Summary” for this purpose - italics surrounded by dotted lines.
• Don’t Research - Use Angle Brackets. My writing group uses <angle brackets> to indicate something that must be filled in later. Other people use the copyediting term TK - to come (sic). The point is, use something unique and searchable. Turn off your Internet, resist the desire to chase links in Wikipedia or TV Tropes, and write <TK: for that thing you wanted to fill in here but couldn’t think of at the time> so you can come back to it later.
• ALTERNATELY. In addition to angle brackets, I use the word “ALTERNATELY” when I realize a scene’s gone the wrong way. Rather than rewriting or creating new connective material, I say ALTERNATELY, or perhaps “ALTERNATELY: Dakota realizes something is wrong” and then pick up where I left off. On the next pass, this is easily fixable.
• Remember, at some point, you may hate it. Sooner or later, every writer falls out of love with their manuscript. That’s OK. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” The point is not to cater to your emotions, but to get through your emotions to the end of your project. Let the hate flow through you! And move on to the next bit. Sooner or later, every writer falls in love with their manuscript - and the sooner you write more words, the sooner you’ll get there.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but these tips helped me.

Writing 50,000 words of rough draft is not writing a novel. You’ve got a lot more to go - between 10,000 and 310,000 words depending on whether you’re aiming at Goosebumps or George R. R. Martin. But if you can get 50,000 words under your belt, you’ll have the pleasure of looking back and realizing you can accomplish quite a climb.

Above you see a big pile of all the words I’ve written in National Novel Writing Month and related challenges, laid out horizontally by day of month and laid down vertically by the challenge in which I wrote them, creating an interesting strata effect, like words deposited by a geological process. This month marks my 20th attempt at Nano, 18 of which were successful:

Deliverance	2002	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Frost Moon	2007	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Blood Rock	2008	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Liquid Fire	2009	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Clockwork	2010	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Clockwork	2010	December Nano	FAILED
Hex Code	2011	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Clockwork	2012	Script Frenzy	WINNER
Spectral Iron	2012	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Marooned	2013	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Spectral Iron	2014	Camp Nanowrimo	WINNER
Spectral Iron	2014	August Nano	FAILED
Phantom Silver	2014	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Spectral Iron	2015	Camp Nanowrimo	WINNER
Hex Code	2015	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Phantom Silver	2016	Camp Nanowrimo	WINNER
Phantom Silver	2016	Camp Nanowrimo	WINNER
Spiritual Gold	2016	Nanowrimo	WINNER
Spiritual Gold	2017	Camp Nanowrimo	WINNER
Spiritual Gold	2017	Camp Nanowrimo	WINNER

As I’ve noted before, the two in which I failed were “off months” where I tried to tackle Nanowrimo on my own. For me, it’s much harder without the external benefit of the contest, and on the two times I tried it I bombed out after a few days. You can see that in this graph, which shows the number of words I’m ahead or behind at each part of the month:

This graph means the most to me, because I was involved in the creation of it, and so intuitively understand it; if I see my monthly progress (the darkest line above) below the dotted line of the average, I know to worry; if I see it below my worst track for any part of the month, I know to really get cracking. Looks like the farthest behind I ever got (and succeeded) was 20,00 words behind, on LIQUID FIRE in 2009, and in PHANTOM SILVER in 2016.

But for people not intimately involved in laying down those tracks, the average amount ahead / behind per day is perhaps more useful:

This shows that a successful Nanowrimo participant can be very far ahead, or very far behind, and still win in the month. Do what works for you! There’s a lot of wiggle room in there.

But if you’re more interested in brass tacks, here’s the maximum and average amount I wrote in each day:

This shows that typically at the start of Nano I’m writing a little bit less than the needed word count per day, and at the end of Nano I’m writing a little bit more - but that the maximum I have to do each day is radically more than that - once almost 10,000 words (and that was a hell of a push, I can tell you - that was PHANTOM SILVER in July of 2016, and I was down to the wire, writing 7000 words in the last day - and finding the Camp Nano counter was 2000 words off of Microsoft Word’s count, so I had to generate 2,000 more words in the last couple of hours).

I will probably dig a bit more into SPIRITUAL over the last two days of the 30 day challenge (I know July has an extra day, but I can use the break). I’m not quite done - the manuscript is at 171,330 words, but maybe 20,000 to 30,000 words of that are in-manuscript notes that need to be turned into text, and then I have a lot I want to cut. During Nano, if I change my mind about how a scene is going, I don’t cut it and rewrite it, because that defeats the purpose of generating words; I write the word ALTERNATELY on its own line and rewrite the scene. After Nano, all that needs to get edited, merged and/or cut.

Often, I find that I’m not satisfied with the first rough draft text I produce in Nano. There are amazing gems in there, but also drek. But at the same time, I find that I am almost always very satisfied at having a text that flows through all the scenes I wanted to write. The idea of a scene in your head is just that - an idea. It’s not real until you write it. If you don’t write it, you can’t improve it - you’ll either long for it to be written, or you’ll elaborate on your idea of it in your head endlessly, or, worst of all, get caught up in the smug satisfaction of your own unfinished work, admiring the creation of something awesome that doesn’t actually exist.

But once you write it, you can see whether the idea works or not. You can decide to keep it, or refine it, or discard it. Even better, it springboards you - into new alternates for the same scene, or new ideas for what happens next, or new insights into your character, their plot, and the themes of your story.

Don’t just dream your story - write it down. Only by writing dreams down can you turn them into reality.

And Nanowrimo is a great place to get started with that. The 50,000 word challenge may seem impossible. It may not even seem like the kind of thing you want to do. No one is making you, after all: you don’t have to. But if your head is filling with ideas and you can’t get them out, why not take on an impossible seeming challenge to write 50,000 words of them down.

Believe me, it’s possible.

-the Centaur

So, for the eighteenth time, I have won a National Novel Writing Month challenge … this time, the 50,000 word challenge for Camp Nano of July 2017!

The cafe I’m in is about to close, but I’m proud to say I (a) finished the 50,000 words a few days early so I can relax this weekend and (b) solved some problems in my manuscript, making it easier for me to reach that final finish line for Dakota Frost #6, SPIRITUAL GOLD!

More tomorrow when I have more time to reflect on getting this much closer to the end …

Onward!

-the Centaur

So this is NOT the cover for Dakota Frost #6, SPIRITUAL GOLD …

... but it is what I'm using as a cover for my Camp Nanowrimo page for July.

For those not in the know, much of the Dakota Frost series is written during National Novel Writing Month and the related Camp Nanowrimo challenges. For each of these, I take on the challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month. This month, I'm working on Dakota Frost #6, SPIRITUAL GOLD.

Now, this may seem far away, as the latest Dakota Frost out is, #3, LIQUID FIRE, available wherever fine books are sold. But, to reduce the gap between books - and to increase the coherence between books, I'm writing the next three Dakota Frost books and the first three Cinnamon Frost books together, as one, giant, loosely-connected, six-part novel.

Dakota Frost's next adventures have the working titles SPECTRAL IRON, PHANTOM SILVER, and SPIRITUAL GOLD. Running just behind each of these will be Cinnamon Frost's first solo adventures, HEX CODE, BOT NET and ROOT USER. I've finished rough drafts of SPECTRAL IRON, PHANTOM SILVER, and HEX CODE, and hope to finish the rough draft of SPIRITUAL GOLD this month.

At that point, I'll start trying to get the Dakota Frost trilogy beaten into shape, even though it will take me two more Nano pushes (at least) to finish up the slightly shorter Cinnamon Frost novels.

Regardless, hope to get these in your hands soon. Wish me luck!

-the Centaur