How I Wrote a NaNoWriMo Novel in 6 Days

An accountability partner can help you stay focused on your writing and keep moving forward. And you and your partner can keep each other focused on taking specific steps to improve the most important things in your life.

Your writing and life in general would go a lot better if you got an accountability partner. But it's your decision.

Get an overview of the various types of novel planning:

• Outlining
• Edit as you go
• The Snowflake Method
• Seat of the Pants
• Microplanning

Why not let technology generate some characters for you? This could be especially helpful for minor characters.

Go ahead and try the Fake Name Generator to get characters for your novel.

It is easy to write one sentence summaries for possible novels. Many will be disposable. A few will be good topics for your novel.

Why not see the one sentence summaries for popular novels. As Tony Robbins says, "Success leaves clues".

Have fun with this one! That is your key to success with this exercise. You might surprise yourself with how many one sentence novel summaries you can write.

The Snowflake Method is a very well structured method for planning your novel. You go through a set of well defined steps and wind up with a detailed plan that you can turn into a novel. If you use this method, your editing will go much faster than it would go with other methods. The downside is that it could easily take weeks to do a complete Snowflake Plan.

We both know that perfectionism is a major source of writers block. It can kill creativity. Let's learn about the First Law of Psychology and how we can apply that to expand our creativity.

You get more of what you reinforce. Your experience shows you that when you observe things in detail, you become more aware of detail. When you describe things, you get better at describing things.

The Law of Effect says that you get more of what you reinforce. But what happens if you do things such as deliberately creating nonsense or stupidity?

Discover the power of nonsense.

Let's do an exercise to reduce blocks to creativity and rapid writing. After you watch the video, please feel free to try the exercise yourself. You can either write or speak the exercise.

Let's look up the definition.

Let's look up the definition of scene.

Could this really be possible?

Let's watch Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk on Your elusive creative genius.

This very important lecture tells you how to unfold a scene to greatly expand the quality of your story.

How to get your story into your computer even if you aren't a fast typist. This can save wear and tear on your hands.

Try voice typing to write your novel quickly. You'll be able to keep going a lot longer than you would with regular typing.

You can let go of the need to be perfect. Get that content into your computer on onto paper!

There is no need for your novel writing to be stuck for more than a minute.

You can be proactive when watching the 18 minute demonstration. It takes only a little bit of effort for maximum results.

This is an example of an 18 minute writing session resulting in 1,400 words of a first draft.

When I get stuck I tell you so. Then I tell you how I'm going to get started again.

This is a very important lesson. I suggest that you watch it several times and note some ways to get unstuck.

Why in the world would anybody want to do NaNoWriMo? Well, there are a lot of good reasons.

Learn about your dashboard, how to set up your novel, writing buddies, and much more.

You can keep up to date on your choice of writing regions around the world.

Choose a home region so you can meet new writing friends who live near you.

You can get discounts on writing related goodies from NaNoWriMo sponsors. Find out here.

On Day 1 I got off to a roaring start. You can see the details here. What went well? What didn't?

I tell you why Day 2 didn't produce much writing.

Why Day 3 was a better writing day for me.

How I kicked it into high gear on Day 4, even though it wasn't all perfect.

On Day 5 I really got going. I could faintly see the finish line in the distance.

I passed 50,000 words and finished my story. I won!!! You'll see me validating my word count.