5 Tips for a Successful NaNoWriMo

With November fast approaching it’s time to prep for NaNoWriMo once again. What’s NaNoWriMo? It’s short for National Novel Writing Month, a writing challenge that encourages participants to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. Although the idea of undertaking such a challenge can be quite intimidating, here are five tips to help you improve your chances of making it to the finish line:

Let's Try This Again

I find it rather disheartening that I haven’t posted anything in this blog since November of last year.  (It’s been more than five months!)  Back in November I had every intention of blogging my way through NaNoWriMo, posting every day - or at least every other day - about my story, my word count, and the general ins and outs of writing 100k words in 30 days.  Well, writing 100k words in 30 days got the best of me and I gave up blogging after day eight.  I did, in fact, finish my NaNo novel, Captive Princess.  I still haven’t had time to read it through, but I was generally satisfied with the story.  I think it makes a nice companion for my 2013 Nano novel, Taming the Savage.

One of the reasons I haven’t posted in a while is because I was getting rather frustrated with the whole blogging thing.  I’m a writer.  I’m hoping to be a published writer someday soon.  And because of that, I had convinced myself that everything in my blog needed to be writing related.  It’s hard to relate every single thing I like or experience to how it affects me as a writer.  And so, I became both frustrated and disenchanted with blogging.  Then, a couple of weeks ago, I attended the Long Island Romance Writers open house and learned something extremely valuable from the panel of published authors present.  Writers seeking publication do not always need to blog about writing.  It’s perfectly okay – in fact, it’s more than okay – to write about your personal interests because it’s a good way to connect with readers on a personal level.   It may sound naïve of me, but I honestly didn’t know that.  Sometimes I take this whole writing-as-a-career-thing so seriously that I forget that it’s okay to still be human, to express more than just my love of the written word, and to share all of myself with the world and not just one part.

So, what does all this mean?  It means that, henceforth, I plan to blog about all sorts of things – even things that have absolutely nothing to do with writing!  It will give me a chance to branch out a bit, to get more comfortable with the medium, and to actually start enjoying the experience.