Thousands of writers every year begin agonizing about whether or not to compete in NaNoWriMo. Nothing is worse than the sinking feeling that an event that is fulfilling for so many won’t get completed! The cause of not completing Nano usually boils down to one or more common problems – and an extra unforeseen problem that hit me the third day of Nano last year! Let’s take a look at the 5 Things That Can Stop You From Completing NaNoWriMo.
- Do you have the time in November? A lot of family obligations occur for Americans in November. Often, people travel to visit family, and it can last four or five days. Yes, that leaves you 25 days to write your novel – and you can do it! But it’s risky, and leaves you no room to spare for unplanned emergencies. And unplanned emergencies always seem to happen during NaNoWriMo! Like my computer crashing on day 3 last year!
- Is there other things requiring your attention? If you have a lot going on (family stress, job related worries, any kind of classes or testing) in November, you might need to skip until next year. NaNoWriMo tends to expand to fill all available time.
- Do you have a clearly defined story in mind to write? This is the number one cause of people failing NaNoWriMo – that, and a lack of understanding how to write a novel. If you have a basic idea or you’ve invented a really cool protagonist with no clearly defined plot of what’s going to happen when… sit it out, or spend some major time planning your novel. Too many people fail Nano because they didn’t plan prior. If you’ve visited my site in the past, you probably know what I’m going to say next – failing to plan is planning to fail. I based last year’s novel on one simple scene and a one line of dialog. Within two days, I’d planned out the novel and had everything ready to go. Otherwise, I’d have failed spectacularly!
- Have you put off everything that can be put off? Anything on TV will need to be DVR’D until December – you need that time to write. If you haven’t, make those plans.If you can’t do it, then sit this year out.
- Do you know the steps of how to plan and write a novel? The number of people who actually are pantsers by nature is statistically small. The rest of us are planners. If you could sit down and just bang out an 85,000 word novel with zero planning, you’d have done it ten times by now. If you haven’t – you’re a planner. Get over it, plan your novel, and don’t resist the three act structure! These things exist to help you! In the next few days, I’ll have some concrete instructions how to do this step-by-step!
Bonus Factor
6. your computer crashes. This happened to me last year. No way to predict it, no way to prevent it. The only thing you can do is manually configure your writing program to automatically save all your work to Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive!
Conclusion
If you have the time and can dedicate that time, you’re about to find Nanowrimo an extremely rewarding experience! I found it was the single most rewarding thing that ever happened as a writer! Fraught with peril and stressful at times, the reward of completing my novel before the deadline made everything worth it.
Give yourself the time you need in October to pick an idea, plan it out, and get yourself ready for Nano – and you’ll be glad you did it! If you don’t take the time to plan, then November is going to be a year of heartbreak as Nano finishes long before you do!
Plan your work, work your plan – and winning Nano will be easy, rewarding and fun!
