NaNoWriMo

Of all the phrases and quotes I've read about the writing process, there's one by Jodi Picoult that I love: "You can always edit a bad page, but not a blank page". The idea is very simple: You don't know what to write? don't worry, just write. You don't know how to continue? don't worry, just write. You can improve it afterwards.

In my opinion, that's the best antidote for what they call "the writer's block". I just write, whatever it is. The goal is to avoid seeing the void in front of me, to see time passing by without making any progress. When I was writing "Das Leben ist gut" I imposed myself one hour of writing a day. It seemed like a clever idea, you create the habit of writing, you generate content. But it wasn't enough. Knowing that regardless of what I would write, I had to sty for an hour in front of the computer, was depressing me. Two months went by and I barely had a chapter finished and a lot of text to throw away.

And then I came across NaNoWriMo. An initiative as simple as elegant. "Write your novel in 30 days", that's how they present themselves, as if they had the magic recipe to write 10-12 books a year. But there is a part of their system that is interesting and that for me at that time was of great help. They propose that you don't measure time, don't count pages. Count words. Write 1000, 2000 words a day, but count words, don't measure anything else.

I tried it. 2000 words a day for 30 days, that meant around 180 pages with the format I had in mind. The whole book. The main difference is that I no longer sat down to write an hour, I sat down to write words that would subtract from those 2000 words that I had to complete each day. Sometimes I would write them down in a row, sometimes I needed several sessions. But I was always motivated to know that it was up to me how fast I moved forward. And that if I sticked to the plan, in a month I would have a decent version of the book.

I insist, the idea is simple, perhaps too basic, but nowadays I use it with the novels I have in progress and it really makes a difference. When I was writing "The Factory of Gods", I was able to devote 4-5 hours a day for 2 weeks to writing. I set myself the target of 5000 words a day, in total about 75000. That's about 60% of the novel. And in only 2 weeks. It is true that afterwards I invested a lot of time in reviewing and improving things, but I've approached it in a different way. I wasn't burned out at that stage.

I encourage you to try NaNoWriMo, but if you're only interested in tracking the words count, Svenja makes very good Excel templates for that.