My NaNo 2018 Plans

NaNoWriMo is still off in the future a few months. Currently it's in the mid-90s and it's the 4th of July. However, I've been thinking a lot about this year's project which is in the advanced planning stages. I've thought about how I'm going to undertake the challenge this year and have decided to shake things up a bit.

While the spirit of the month is quantity over quality (50,000 words in 30 days), I have decided that I'm not going to incessantly pore over my word count. My plan is to check it and update it once a week, and maybe a couple times in the last week for verification.

I will not be writing in Scrivener, but in OneNote, which what I've taken to doing since it's readily synced up with all of my computing devices (I'm writing this in OneNote on my phone, for example). Don’t get me wrong, Scrivener is possibly the best novel-writing software on the market, but I want to switch things up this year.

I will write every day, but some days may be more productive than others. I’ve found that forcing myself to write at least 1,667 words per day makes me less productive overall. I have a tendency to want to keep going forward on my story idea rather forward on word count. That is, I don’t like to go back to an earlier point in the story and start writing from there again. I tend to want to pick up from the last events that I wrote, whether they’re good or not. I will be thinking more about the story this year since I am more productive when I have fresh ideas in my head.

I seem jump way out ahead of daily goals in the first week and then slow down after that. That’s because the idea is fresh and there are infinitely many directions I could go with the story, but that quickly narrows down to only a few directions and I rarely, if ever, choose wisely. Thinking about this, I could write a Choose Your Own Adventure style of story this year and keep going back to the beginning. Or, I could start writing thirty different stories, that way I get the day one momentum every day of November.