Nanowrimo download forum thread archive

Your writing wrist. Day 1 Write a premise. Day 2 Write a skeleton. Day 3 Write character introductions. Day 4 Write your Short Synopsis.

Days 5 and 6 Write your extended synopsis. Days 7 and 8 Write your Goal to Decision Cycle. Days 9 to 11 Complete Full Character Profiles. Days 12 and 13 Describe your locations.

Days 14 to 17 Do your Advanced Plotting. Days 18 to 21 Write your Character Viewpoints. Days 22 to 24 Block out Your First Act. Days 25 to 26 Consider Themes and Variations. Days 27 to 28 Block out Your Second Act. Days 29 to 30 Block out Your Third Act. The idea of writing 50, words in 30 days doesn't give me the fear anymore - it doesn't even feel like a strain. Forget about 50, words. From now on I want you only to think about 2, words per day. That should be your mantra.

If you average about 2, words per day, you even get to have a few days off. Well, nano is now your baby. You probably ought to still feed the kids. This is the most important part.

The only way you can be sure of getting through Nanowrimo without having any panic moments of staring at a blank page or feeling the fear as the minutes pass by and no words appear in front of you — is to already have a pretty clear outline. There are various ways to prepare an outline for a novel. You could use genre templates, follow the Roadmap steps, or by inspired by these 25 ideas from the inimitable Chuck Wendig.

Do what works for you, but ideally, before you sit down on the 1 st November, you will have a list of scenes, with at least a few sentences describing the gist of each one. The potential advantage of drinking is the reduction or removal of inhibitions - or in the case of writing: your inner critic. There is plenty of time in writing a novel for editing, checking over, being a perfectionist, but - and I can't state this strongly enough - the first draft is NOT that time.

Trying to get everything right is probably the biggest reason people never finish their first novel, and if it's not finished, then it's definitely not perfect. It's imperative you just steam on through, and never look back. Don't edit, don't even read it.

Anything that is not writing words is wasting precious time that could be spent writing more words. This is probably the most valuable piece of advice regarding writing your first draft in a month. Just one more sentence. Go on. Just one more. But my partner who was also doing it and I drew two thermometers on a piece of A3 paper and stuck it up on the wall.

You could feel the tension rise in the room every time one of us got up to fill in a bit of the thermometer, and the sweat on the brow of the other person as they furiously increased their tapping. The desire to be slightly ahead of another person is far more powerful than the desire to reach a given number. From the Internet, from your phone, from all social media. Having two or three days to get your head down and thrash out the last five thousand words could be the difference between success and failure.

Do you have rules you follow that help you win Nanowrimo? Share your tips and tricks in the comments! Are you on Twitter? We share these tips daily during Nanowrimo on our twitter account, so follow us there to receive these as a drip feed! I've heard it said that literary agents groan at the beginning of December, because they know that they're about to get inundated with scrappy manuscripts created by excited writers during Nanowrimo. I daresay Amazon data would bear out a similar pattern when it comes to self-published ebooks.

But while you may be excited, even euphoric, about having completed the first draft of your novel and you well should be - it's a great achievement try not to damage your chances of becoming a successful author by jumping the gun. This could be the first draft of a novel that will be published one day and become a bestseller - you wouldn't be the first. Head to the experts forum. Someone there surely knows.

A word of warning, however. Time you spend in any of these communities takes away from the time you have to write. Beware of time sucks and rabbit holes. Perhaps set a timer to limit how long you spend scrolling through the interesting forum threads. You have words to write!

Chocolate and meditation books are my favorites right now and I also need coffee and tea. But we also need to eat healthy foods. Remember to eat a vegetable once in awhile and some protein too. Friends and family can help here. If they want to support your efforts, invite them to bring you snacks! Boundaries are your friends in November and always. If you exercise regularly, do your best to keep that up. Who knows! The habit might stick beyond November.

Your emotions can use a strength session too. Five minutes of meditation or a ten-minute writing practice session can refresh you during the month. No need to complicate it. The simplest thing can have a great benefit.

More on that in a moment. Losing work to a hardware or software fault during NaNoWriMo could be disastrous, so we strongly advise backing up your manuscript to the cloud. For peace of mind, we recommend keeping multiple backups of your work in different locations, including at least one online. Dropbox integrates particularly well with Windows, but if you want more storage space or enhanced security features, check out our full roundup of free cloud storage services.

NaNoWriMo is all about powering through and getting a first draft down as quickly as possible, so some grammatical errors are par for the course. Grammarly is available as a free extension for Firefox, Edge, Safari and Chrome plus other Chromium-based browsers like Vivaldi that detects common errors and suggests corrections.

You can use it when writing online, or copy and paste parts of your manuscript to analyze them. If you want to check your work on your desktop, Grammarly Premium analyzes text in native desktop apps.

In addition to spelling and grammar, it also hunts down issues with sentence structure and style to help improve your work. Autocrit is a similar app designed specifically for novelists.