Is an introduction needed? NaNoWriMO is a very well-known organization and world-wide event in which thousands of people attempt to write a manuscript in just one month. In the month of November. If you are not familiar, visit the official web to learn more. Here you can find tips that will help you succeed and become a novelist! Use October to get ready.

Plan

You may enjoy the free inspiration flow all your life, nothing wrong with that. But with just a month to complete an at least acceptable first draft manuscript, you cannot afford getting lost in your plot path or running into a solid wall of “no idea what should happen next.” Make at least a brief plan of the main events.

Characters

Just like with the plot, create at least the basic form of your character. You can also enjoy these preparations and create a number of characters you may never use in your NaNoWriMo manuscript this year. But you can exercise your character creation skill and use the spare characters in your short stories or other novels. You can use the downloadable character sheet here.

Support Group

You are going to need support. Preferably people who fight in the same trench as you do. Try to find NaNo soulmates and create a close group in which you will keep an eye on each other, give each other support, and push forward together, word by word.

You can try to find people with similar writing and reading tastes. Or people from your neighborhood so you can see each other or even work together.

Use various NaNo groups to find this support and try to recruit as many co-writers as possible. In each fight, there are casualties. You need a big circle to keep at least some support as people are likely to quit or just lose interest in Nano in the process.

Determination and Self-care

You are going to need it. Use the time before November to judge your writing options and make several strategies. You may usually have time at a specific time of a day. It is thus natural to plan the majority of your writing at this point. But life happens. You may lose this time because of work, family, sick pet… Therefore, you should also have some tricks ready to get more extra time if needed. Send your family to the park or to have a meal. Know where to get babysitting. Try to work more shifts or do something extra in your work in October and ask your boss to give you some earned free time next month if possible.

And you also need to remember to rest. Plan in advance relaxing and completely not writing-related activities to clear your thoughts. Again, you can spend some time with other people, play a PC game, go to the bar, or get your hair done. You can use these as rewards after reaching some small milestone in your NaNo manuscript.

Your resources place

You need to have full and quick access to all your prepared ideas and other sources. Therefore, gather the copies of your preparations. You can throw everything into your Google drive. This way, you can also make a copy of this folder which you can share with your support group. Always use a copy and keep a separate folder with the original resources. Accidents and unwanted actions like rewriting or deleting files happen.

You can also print everything and have it in a box beside your computer so you can study several pages and write at the same time.