National Novel Planning Month (that should be a thing)

<p>I’m a fan of NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month, in which the plan is to write 50,000 words of a novel in November. It’s about 1666 words a day, a little more if you take off for Thanksgiving, and it’s do-able to get to 50K words. But realistically, most people’s result, even if they “win” isn’t a draft of a novel. It’s usually the rambling draft of the first half or two-thirds at best. Because even if your preferred method of writing is to “pants” (As opposed to plot), getting a novel draft to actually END is perhaps the most difficult part. Even the “murky middle” is easier to draft than those concluding scenes. </p><p>But NaNoWriMo can—and has, for many people—end in an actual draft that becomes a novel. There’s something about the energy of the month and the challenge of imposing those 1666 words on days that are already full of countless things that really works for many of us. <a target="_blank" href="https://bookshop.org/a/1183/9780593085141">The Chicken Sisters</a> began (after years of noodling) as a NaNoWriMo project in 2018, and plenty of other authors also attribute their first drafts to NaNo. I drafted <a target="_blank" href="https://bookshop.org/a/1183/9780593713792">Playing the Witch Card</a> during November, too. The key is to make a plan and stick to it (and not abandon it if it bleeds into December, either). There’s nothing I love more than making a plan—so here are my keys to NaNoWriMo success.</p><p>First: Recognize if this is for you. For me, the combined challenge of confining the draft to a month and the ridiculousness of making it November—hello, Thanksgiving, all the things—actually makes me more determined. Tell me I can’t do a thing and watch my dust. I love the sheer ridiculousness and arbitrariness of shoehorning this in. It fits perfectly into the model of things I’ve achieved in the past. So that’s the question: when have you been successful at seeing a project through to the end? Did it look like NaNoWriMo? Or maybe it was similar, with more or less accountability. Did it h