Have you figured out one of the reasons why November produces so many first-time novelists?
I did. There are actually two reasons, but we’ll cover the second one tomorrow.
NaNoWriMo offers you something you never had before in terms of your creativity. Do you know what it is yet?
A deadline. Yep. A deadline. Sure, there isn’t an editor that’s going to chew your face off if you miss it, but many productivity resources state that making even an artificial deadline is just as effective as having an authority-enforced deadline.
I realized this after my birthday last year. I committed that I would give myself a birthday gift of a completed manuscript before I turned 35. I made a deadline. So every day that passed I realized I was getting closer to that deadline. And do you know what happened?
My behavior changed. Urgency was introduced to this nebulous idea of “one day I’m going to be an author.” Now, I had something concrete.
Long story short, I completed a non-fiction book proposal on October 31 of this year. I didn’t realize at the time that non-fiction book publication is based on a proposal and fiction is based on a completed manuscript (this is whole other discussion). However, something else happened, I realized that I also wanted to write a fiction book. NaNoWriMo gave me a deadline for the completion of the book proposal because I didn’t want to be be working on a proposal and writing a fiction manuscript.
Now I have a manuscript deadline for NaNoWriMo and I have a completed book proposal!
Deadlines produce urgency, and unfortunately, creation is an art. Having a deadline just doesn’t sound as sexy as saying “I’m creating art.”
Here are some guidelines for deadlines that are working when it comes to the NaNoWriMo deadline motivation.
1) Use the daily deadline word count. Getting that 1,667 in really helps to spur motivation. This also helps to chunk down that 50K into bite-sized pieces.
2) Use a “scene deadline.” Work on three scenes a day and bounce around. Who said you had to work on one scene to completion? Let go that rule and build a robust creative work space. You’d be surprised how quickly your world populates when you’re bouncing around.
3) Use an hourly deadline when you’re working. For instance, if you start writing at 8:00 am, say that you’re going to write 500 words by 8:30 am. It’s easy to let your “writing time” become your “distraction time.”
4) Cut the quantity of what you’re doing in half. This I still from Jon Acuff’s book, Finish. If you can’t write around 1667 words per day, write 850 per day. NaNoWriMo will not benefit you if perfection is your goal. Make progress your goal. Let’s say it’s November 30 and you have 20,000 words of your novel complete. That’s 20,000 more words than you would have had apart from NaNoWriMo.
So start looking for ways to use the deadline to your creative advantage and win! Get to writing.