WriMo Ireland

Thousands of people are already well into their novelling for November (myself among them, thankfully), while plenty of people have yet to get started.

I thought I’d post here some of the tips I put in a Northern Ireland-wide mail sent yesterday.

Visit the NaNoWriMo website frequently:

• to read the FAQs (remember to read the rules thoroughly) and to get hints and tips from the people in the know
• to donate to NaNoWriMo if you can afford it; it’s a non-profit organisation and needs money to keep going, plus some funds are given to charity, and all donors get a virtual halo plus some real life goodies; if you can’t afford to donate, consider using GoodSearch as your search engine for the month, full details on the site
• to keep in touch with others in your region, or writing in the same genre; there are over a hundred thousand of us WriMos and we can all help each other out
• and most importantly, to update your word count and validate it when you’re done!

Also hang out here to take part in real-time chat and word sprints with your fellow writers in Ireland.

Write every day! Even if you don’t manage 1,667 words one day, you can always make it up the next. Keep track of your progress, so you know how much more you have to do. But pace yourself: although it’s good to get a lot done quickly so you can take it easy later, be careful not to burn yourself out too soon.

Keep your momentum going while writing. If you get stuck for a name, fill in XXX and go back later if you need to. Don’t sweat the small stuff too much; NaNoWriMo is about quantity, not quality, and it’s not going to matter at this point if you haven’t researched something thoroughly, or you think a sentence reads badly. Editing is what the other eleven months of the year are for.

Go to meet-ups as much as you can! They may seem like a waste of valuable writing time, but face-to-face contact with people in the same situation is quite good therapy, and many meet-ups will involve some writing time.

Above all, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t write 50,000 words in a month… because you can and you will!

Tags: tips

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 8:34 pm and is filed under NaNoWriMo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.