What's the month, my fine fellow? Why, it's novel writing month!

It’s November, the dismal season where I live, and the traditional knuckle-down season for my people (ie, novelists). The NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month) organization closed recently, but it had been around for 25 years before that, and it’s embedded in the culture to some degree. There are lots of WriMo challenges happening in more distributed ways this month; I’m doing one with some friends, where everyone sets their own goals for the month and reports in once a day.

There are many novelists for whom the idea of writing a lot of words in a short time has never been very appealing, which is fine and fair. For others, NaNo is a way to draw strength from camaraderie and get over some of the barriers that can get in our way with big projects. I have never seen it as a time to “write crap”, which some people do (both critics and some participants). It’s been useful to me to get focus on projects, and I always have a project on the go.

Besides, if you’re a working writer with deadlines, the idea of writing steadily to a certain word-count goal over a given chunk of time is not likely to be outside your experience, even outside of group challenges. Art can be slippery and requires a lot of staring out the window, but for most of us, it also requires discipline and some tools to get the thing done.

I’ve been working on The New Novel as my November project. (This is the one that will be coming out from HarperVoyager UK after Mercutio, so 2027 ish). I had a good start on this draft back in the spring, and then I wrestled and revised the first third of it a few times, and then got a bit stalled on it in the middle. The novel’s due at the end of the year, so I’ve got to get over myself and finish it. And it’s actually going well now — all the thinking I did earlier in the year is resulting in a pretty steady word count now, as I know what I want to do with these scenes.

The challenge will come later in November, as I get into later scenes I haven’t thought about in detail: the Here Be Dragons part of the outline. That’s always the difficulty for me with fast-drafting. But it helps if I remember to set aside time to think and plan, and if I deliberately use time spent driving or chores to think about the next scenes.

So here are my biggest tips for trying to make steady progress on a big project on deadline:

• Do at least a little every day, while you’re in this crunch period. You will have days when the car breaks down and you didn’t sleep well and the news is awful and writing your full daily target feels impossible. On those days, if you can get even a few sentences down, that will reduce the gap that future you will confront. It really makes a difference. I often find that if I drag myself to the project and say “OK, Kate, 50 words. You can write 50 words. That’s 3 sentences.” — then I will get 50 more, and 50 more, and the day’s progress is not lost. The key to that trick is setting the target ridiculously low, so you know you can meet it and you won’t talk yourself out of trying. The perfect is the enemy of the good when it comes to productivity.

• Do think about what you want to do next, in spare moments. Taking the time to write a few bullet points to guide the scene, or even every chunk of a scene, can save a great deal of blank-page despair, and will help you focus on your sentences rather than your structure.

• The best thing about NaNoWriMo was always the community. I find that when I can check in with an accountability buddy, or meet up on Zoom or in a coffee shop to work in companionship, I do so much better. Everyone’s different and some people like solitude and silence for writing, but a buddy for check-ins and commiseration is valuable. The Print Run Podcast is among those doing novel-writing-month content, if you’re interested in finding community.

All my best to you in your endeavours this month!