✍️ How to Make NaNoWriMo Your Own Personal Writing Retreat
or, A New Way to Juggle Competing Priorities So You Can Write Again
I’m beginning to wonder if maybe you think I’m making up all these conversations I have with other writers. I assure you, I’m not. I like to be light and flippant in these pages, for sure. I may exaggerate for effect. (I’m not really mad at Sara Miller...) But the facts I present about me and my life are true.
So rather than believe that I’m going off on an Uncle Olaf-type anecdote, know that this really is yet another conversation I had with a writer IRL.
It boiled down to this: the writer in question was worried that she wasn’t putting enough time into her writing. I wanted to be careful about what I said. After all, carving out time is important. But so too are all the other competing priorities in our lives, and things like work and kids can’t be backburnered.
Trying to find the time to write and the guilt associated with it are common themes that I’ve covered here before in a post about self-love and a post about writing goals, among others I’m sure. Compounding the problem is the fact that often when we do have a few minutes to steal away, we don’t know what to write about. This adds to the guilt and our feelings of failure.
I think that’s what was happening in the case of this particular writer. I tried to assuage her guilt. I said to her, well, you’ve got a lot on your plate. Maybe the problem isn’t the writing but the expectations you put on yourself. Maybe plan to put writing aside for the moment while you concentrate on other important things in your life. After all, you can’t do everything for everyone all at once...
That was about two weeks ago, as of this post.
Today, I have a new answer.
Reshuffle Your Priorities for a Month; In Fact, This Month Coming Up
I stand by the statement that sometimes your writing has to take a back seat to other priorities. But sometimes, maybe, you can put your other priorities in the trunk for a short while to concentrate on your writing?
For example, if you’re the one who makes dinner most nights, maybe for a month some others in your household can take over. Or, maybe you get takeout instead. Maybe doing dishes slows down, and you don’t freak out about it. Maybe instead of movie night every Friday with the family, you have writing night just for you for four weeks.
Basically, what you are saying to yourself is, yes, these other priorities matter, and most of the time I’m on top of it 100%. But for this month, I’m on top of it 50% (or 0% or whatever) so that I can be on top of writing 100% instead. It’s like a writing vacation – a home-based writing retreat, if you like – and the focus is on you.
November is National Novel Writing Month (even though it’s now international), or NaNoWriMo if you are hip. I should point out, the hip seem to be leaving NaNoWriMo lately due to its stance on AI writing. I don’t want to re-hash that or comment on it whatsoever. But I do want talk about how every year it gets thousands of writers to concentrate on writing their books (or 50,000 words) within 30 days.
And oh, that’s so doable. Two thousand words a day gives you 60,000 words – longer than The Great Gatsby. Three thousand words a day gives you 90,000 words, longer than the average length of book in most genres. Five thousand words... well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The point is, committing to prioritizing writing for a month gives you an excuse AND a mandate to write every day. That’s a powerful double-whammy tool to help you get words on the page.
Some Tips for Planning Your Month
Just like when plan when you’re taking a trip, it’s helpful to have a plan for your month of writing. Here are some things I’d suggest:
Decide what you want to write before you write it. This isn’t crucial, especially if you’re a natural pantser. But one of the things that trip us up is the blank page, so finding a topic ahead of time is helpful. Feel free to outline or even start writing before November 1 – this is your personal writing journey, so do whatever works for you.
Create a countdown calendar. Maybe even an advent-type calendar leading up to your writing month. You can even give yourself little gifts like a pen, Post-It Notes, a notebook, new headphones to block out the world, a mascot – whatever you like! NaNoWriMo starts in about 10 days... Get excited!
Plan the details. The when, where, how, etc. Will you write every morning before work? Will you write every night once the family has gone to bed? Can you carve an hour every day out of work time to write? Are you taking some time off work and perhaps make writing your job for a while? Will you write in the kitchen or a coffee shop or the spare room in the basement? Will you use a laptop, notebook, magic erase pad? (That last one is not recommended...) Figuring these things out now will give you more writing time later.
Set some accountability. One of the great things about a program like NaNoWriMo is that it has accountability built in. You commit to writing, and then you write. But if you choose to write independently – and there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s helpful to build some sort of accountability. Track your daily writing in terms of hours, goals, or word count. Maybe write with another writer and hold each other accountable. There are also some Writing Accountability Groups (WAGs) out there, if you search for them. Accountability will help you fight through the doldrums and keep writing.
Set goals and give yourself rewards, but don’t live or die by them. As I’ve said before, goals are great if they motivate, but they are counterproductive if they make you feel bad. I find that hourly goals work better for me than word-count goals because if I put an honest hour in and wrote 32 words, that just means it wasn’t flowing for me that day. By the same token, give yourself rewards for the goals you hit like a specialty tea or a new pen. You deserve it!
Don’t put expectations on the quality of your work. When I mentioned above about The Great Gatsby, I was referring to length only. You can’t expect to bang out a masterpiece in 30 days. But what you can do is get the basis of a book down. Then, like a lump of clay, you can start forming the story from there. These 30 days are your time to let loose creatively so you have something to work with in the rewrite stages later.
If November doesn’t work, pick another month. Some months are busier than others. Choose a different month if November doesn’t work for you, like slow times at work. And, it doesn’t even have to be a month – do two weeks if that’s better. Again, this is your writing journey, so choose what works best for you!
Key Takeaways: Making time to write is always difficult while juggling competing priorities. But if you can reprioritize your life so that writing can come first, even for just a month like during NaNoWriMo, you can carve out some serious writing time and get a good jump on that writing project.
Over to You: Where Do You Find Writing Time?
Have you done NaNoWriMo before? Did it give you the time and excuse you needed to write? Are you planning to do NaNoWriMo again or for a first time? What other ways do you find ways to write? Let us know in the comments below!
I’ll leave you with a video on how to write consistently every day during NaNoWriMo – though of course you can do it any month (January is usually a better one for me...!) Scroll down below to view.
Until next time... keep writing with wild abandon!
~Graham
email me if you get lost.
Excellent advice once again, Graham.