We went dark there for a while! It wasn’t a planned intermission, but it turned handy there in the month of November.

I set my sights on winning in National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), you see! And I made the decision with less than half of my 30 days remaining. I had a small head start, but 50,000 words is an awful lot, no matter how you slice it. But, hey — I did it!

I’ve made token efforts at participating in NaNoWriMo before, but always got waylaid by my perfectionist tendencies. I couldn’t just be happy writing “a story”, it had to my best idea executed flawlessly. That doesn’t mesh well with keeping up a daily word count.

My battle from behind taught me some interesting things about how to keep things moving when you need to hit a certain target in a writing session, and what sort of tricks you can use when you run into trouble. A lot of these are NaNoWriMo-centric, and focused on word count, but a lot of it is good advice when you just need to produce.

Create a short-hand code for “fix this later”. In my story, every now and then a word or phrase would get under my skin, and I’d feel I could leave it just sitting there. But if it’s not an easy tweak, that’s a good way to get off track. Instead, I started just sticking an asterisk next to the word so I could find it later with CTRL+F, when I had some for fine-tuning. Real-world facts I wanted to use, but didn’t know (the length between two places, say) became XXX*, so I could just keep moving to the important writing. Fact-checking is counter productive on a first draft.

If you change your mind, don’t despair: keep moving. After a long chunk of my tale, I realized a part wasn’t working. More drama was necessary. In fact, in the last chapter, things should have gone totally differently. Someone should have died. Did I go back to fix it so I could keep going? No. Reworking a big chunk of text can set you back big-time without adding to your word count. Note the change (in a separate place, or perhaps in the story itself, like “XXX HE ACTUALLY DIES HERE XXX”) and pretend it’s all fixed already. Imagine the way it should be, build on that premise, and keep on rolling.

Find a place where all you do is wage battle with words. My progress slowed to a crawl when I was writing from my PC at home. I finished much, much more when I wrote in one late-night coffee shop or another. Keep your eye out for the places with a good ambience, plenty of space, late hours, and free wi-fi (if you use Google Drive like I did). All kinds of things and concepts live in your house, and your brain is trained those are the things you do there. A new place has no preconceptions; you can assign it the associations you need.

A sub-optimal writing device can be just about perfect. My laptop’s battery is useless, so it’s not very mobile at all. Worse, knock out the cable and it does. So it is that I relied almost entirely on these tools: a Nexus 7 tablet, a wireless Bluetooth keyboard from Motorola, and the Google Drive application. The Nexus 7 is handy already, and can perform most of the tasks a laptop could — just only one at a time. With a separate keyboard, I could type just as fast as usual. And the device’s multitasking limitations, compared to a laptop or desktop, actually help keep the focus on the main goal: getting those words written.

As it turns out, 50,000 words isn’t as much as it sounds. If I’d started on the 1st of November instead of halfway through, it’d have been easy. And it’s not so much another way, too: I’m only about halfway to the actual end of the story I’m writing. There’s lots of events still to come. 50,000 words is really just a novella, like Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which is about 60,000.

I’m glad I made it to my goal by the end of the month, and I’m interested to see where the second half takes me. Even that won’t be the end, but revisions and edits have to wait for that first draft. I’m thrilled that this year, I’m already halfway there.