How I am Preparing for #NaNoWriMo



1. One line a day for every day of writing. A reasonably popular tweet by myself here put it like this: http://twitter.com/CjEggett/status/26452036043

@dirtywhitecandy Good #NaNoWriMo tip: Plan ahead with one line for each day. 30 lines today is a giant ladder in November!less than a minute ago C J Eggett


All these lines aren’t the same kind of lines. Some are key phrases, some are first lines, some are merely descriptions of what I hope will happen in that day’s writing.

I can now see the points of contraction and release across the whole story arc - albeit very roughly.

2. Boxing off other projects. The process of “boxing up” out standing work consists of me collecting together something similar to a “report” or “assessment”. I look at the current work critically and gather the measure of the problems. I write these down. I then collect together ideas for each text and put them and add them to the “report”.

I then put it somewhere safe and out the way of my eyeline (certainly not within a few clicks of the desktop!) - the equivalent of getting a persona taller than you to put something on a high shelf (and taking away your ladder, and making sure you’re blacklisted at the ladder shop).

Currently I have the following which needs boxing up:

  • a short film script about two old men following a fridge into the German mountains
  • Novel currently called “The Correspondence of Philip Turnbuckle” (old, at about 30,00 words)
  • Novel currently titled “Mossy Treacles” (Newish, at about 20,000 words)
  • Poems (Scraps and drafts)



3. Stop Drinking So Much.

4.Procrastination. Write a blog post about how you’re going to prepare for #NaNoWriMo, maybe make a twitter list - and definitely get involved with hashtags on twitter like #litchat. Make sure your procrastinations look like real work, and if you must, make time for it instead of actually doing any preparation. After a nearly lethal does of procrastination you might start trying to justify it to yourself with irony and humor. Stop and listen to this:



Then forget about step 3 and return to step one.