Mindy Carlson

Never try to do NaNoWriMo and plan a curling bonspiel for kids at the same time.

I’ve dropped out of trying to hit my goal of 50K words in 30 days, which is a weird goal anyway when you’re in rewriting mode. You add 1000 words and then delete 1000 words all on the same day. In fact, I have two days last week where my total words added is -12.

If you’re also flagging in your goal of hitting 1,667 words per day you’re not alone. So many of us come out of the gate on November 1^st going a hundred miles an hour and by November 5^th we’re flagging, barely hitting a hundred words a day.

So, how can you get back on track? Here are 5 things that helped me.

1 – Don’t beat yourself up. Letting what you should’ve done run around in your head only sucks away the energy from getting started right now. Put the “should’ves” behind you and focus on what you can do now.

2 – Look at your calendar this week. Find all the hours, minutes, moments you have in your day and schedule in your writing. And writing isn’t only typing out swaths of prose. It’s jotting down ideas, rough outlines for next steps, pieces of dialogue floating around in your brain. Then you take fifteen minutes and write as much as you can. I can get anywhere from 400 to 1000 words done in just fifteen minutes if I’ve had time to think about what the scene needs to do. 

3 – In line with #2 above, think about writing in sprints. Many successful authors do them, especially when they are on a deadline, need to hit a word count goal, or have a ton of distractions around them and can only carve out 15 or 20 minutes here and there. It’s one of my favorite hacks for getting through a writer’s block as well.

4 – Find a new environment. I have trouble getting deep into my writing at home. (Although maybe my new office will fix that!) Too many other things pull at me. Laundry. Dishes. Internet reels about toxic mothers-in-law and/or Ted Lasso clips. Other daily household life. But Wednesdays I go to my local coffee shop and sit down away from all that. My focus is solely on my story. I can get about 3000 words done in two hours.

5 – Make a sticker chart. This is something else I do on the regular. I draw a monthly calendar in my notebook and I use fun stickers like these to put on the days I reach my word count goal. (I will admit, I just bought 8 more books of stickers when I went to fix the hyperlink into this newsletter.) There’s something about a putting a sticker on my goals that brings me right back to Mrs. Olson’s second grade class and the elation I’d feel when I saw the bright gold stars she’d put on our outstanding work.

NaNoWriMo is a great opportunity to try out a lifestyle of dedicated writing and get that novel idea that’s been rattling around in your head for the last few years onto a page. Don’t be discouraged if you can’t get all 50K words done in November. In reality, writing is a marathon and not a sprint. Just keep at it.

Happy NaNoWriMo to you!

Mindy

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