Preptober Class Part 4: Tips and Practicalities

Nanowrimo starts next Wednesday!

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Okay, so this calendar is from 2019 but it was the best image I could find. Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash

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It’s Friday. In just a few days you’ll be sitting down to your computer with a scary lovely blank pages in front of you, cursor blinking. You’ll take a deep breath and begin the wonderful madness that is Nanowrimo.

It’s going to be an exciting month and Nanowrimo is also challenging. Today’s session is thus about the practicalities of getting you through November and writing 50,000 words. And at the risk of you saying duh in response, I will also add that these tips apply to novel writing at any time of the year.

Also, these are in no particular order. Because my brain is not behaving in an orderly fashion this morning.

Remember your why

It seems to me that this whole “why” thing has become trendy to promote over the last couple of years. And that’s because there’s a good reason for it. When you falter, fumble, get blocked or stuck, when the words just won’t come, going back to your why can help you recover. Your why is uniquely yours and it can range from, I want to show those suckers who taunted me, to I seek to explain social activism, to I want to be a bestselling author like Danielle Steele. It doesn’t matter what your why is, it is yours alone. Embrace it.