Completing NaNoWriMo With An Impossible Schedule

I always imagined those sorts of mild epiphanies to strike when gazing up at a starry sky, or standing upon a snowy mountain-top (not that I’ve ever hiked higher than Debenhams’ second floor). Instead, it was June, 2013, 2am, I was staring at an email from ‘Camp NaNoWriMo’, my hair on end from another sleepless night with a teething toddler, and Play-doh trodden into my socks, remembering with sadness the novel I always planned to write before I’d put it off for a month, which turned into a year, which turned into many. I thought: if I didn’t have enough time then (pre-toddler, pre-university, pre-work, pre-seventeen-wash-loads-a-day, pre-dinosaur-cake-baking-stress and pre-chaos), then I certainly don’t have enough time now. And then the light bulb clinked: there’s no such thing as the right time, or enough time. Only time.

In that dark room, I decided, once and for all, that I would complete NaNoWriMo, and that I wouldn’t stop until my first draft was finished. It took discipline, taking myself out for vats of coffee to seduce myself into agreeing to write, and some days, I’d go to bed positive a chimpanzee whacking its furry face against a keyboard would produce better than what I wrote that day (and I was probably right), but I did it. Thanks to NaNoWriMo, and a couple of months more, I finally reached my 100,000 word goal. Oh, they were messy, unformatted, sometimes bland and well, frankly, sometimes utterly dreadful words, but a first draft they made. After years of just daydreaming, self-doubt and excuses, at the peak of chaos in my life, my novel, Bubbles, was written. I did it. And if I can, so can you. 

All writers have tips, and while one tip may be golden for someone, for another, it may not shine at all. But during my NaNoWriMo quest, these are the main things that got me to the finish line, and I hope they might help you get there, too.

Be time-clever

Erase that image in your head. The one where you have an eight hour stretch of peace ahead of you, where your house resembles a Pinterest home, when that pain-in-the-neck client at work has moved to Jupiter so your job isn’t as stressful, and your mind is so full that words seep easily out of your fingertips, producing gorgeous, flowing prose. Stop waiting, and instead, be clever with the time you do have. If you have an hour’s lunch break, write for half an hour of it. If the kids are quiet for 20 minutes when Peppa Pig is on, write. If everyone is up, awake and banging their spoons against the breakfast table at 7am each morning, then push yourself, with all your might, to the kitchen at 6, fuel up on caffeine and have an hour of writing before bustle ensues. Make writing your treat and grab time wherever you can. Eventually, those dribbles of 200 words here, 500 there, will mount to chapters you beam about.

Write anywhere

And I don’t just mean in cafes, in the car (as a passenger), at the park, on the bus. I mean anywhere and on anything. Don’t just limit your writing to when you can make it to your computer. As the oldest bit of writing advice goes, carry a notebook, or index cards that can be scribbled onto quickly when free time suddenly presents itself, and be smart with your smart phone. I write a lot on ‘Notes’ on my iPhone. In fact, I wrote the rough ending to my novel – a moment I’d imagined being one full of tears, pride and bittersweet grief – on the sofa on my phone, as my toddler straddled my shoulders and put his toy Triceratops in a “deep, dark cave” (my ear).  The words matter. Nothing else. So write anywhere, in every sense of the word, and on a swaying boat with a chisel and paving slab if it’s all you have handy.

Forget “perfect”

Take off your perfectionism like a tight-fitting pair of undercrackers, breathe, and throw it into a safe that opens only with the completion of your first draft. Let your writing be messy, full of mistakes, have chunks you want to throw angrily into a crackling fireplace, and embrace it – let your imagination run away. You can make it sparkle later.

Believe in yourself

It sounds incredibly cliché, but realising the evil, conniving voice that cackles things like “nobody wants to read what you write”, “you’re not a writer”, and “your writing sucks compared to *insert name here*” is a big liar frees up much precious mind-space. You are a writer, or you wouldn’t be here, and your story deserves to be told and you deserve to tell it.

NaNoWriMo isn’t about producing a sparkling, bestselling manuscript in 30 days. It’s about tapping out those words, however they want to come, wherever and whenever you can. It’s about owning those snippets of time, writing without thinking, because regardless of how many words you have at the end of November, it’s more than you would have had, had you not bothered at all. It’s about finally discovering, chipping away at, and starting to, as Anne Rice once said, write the book of your dreams.

 Lia is a mum-of-one, working as a copywriter and studying for a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing. Her first novel, Bubbles, is in the submission process and she is about to start her second this NaNoWriMo. She lives at home, in Hertfordshire, with her boyfriend, three year old, and stacks of clothes and books.