Costumes are coming off, seasonal candy is on clearance, and el Dia de los Muertos is underway. That can only mean one thing: November is here once again, and that means National Novel Writing Month is back.
Longtime readers may be getting deja vu looking at this title. However, it’s no mistake. I will once again be participating in NaNoWriMo this year, although my goals and approach will be different this time around. This is mostly to reflect on how I did last year and not only match that, but improve from there.
Goals For This Year
I won’t lie to myself: This is going to be somewhat harder, as I have since gotten a more demanding job compared to last year. Consequently, I have less free time on my hands to dedicate to writing a little here or there during the day, and my move over the summer has left me struggling to consistently rejoin the 5 AM Club, which was how I kept up with most of my writing each morning last year.
Still, I just want to get myself back to some basics, which is why I’m measuring the following criteria to determine my success:
- Writing daily with a focus on a daily writing habit above all else
- Continuing the draft I started last year
- Surpassing my word count from last year with a minimum of 30k words
That last criteria is still lenient when compared to the usual 50k words qualifying as “winning” NaNo. However, considering I just barely cracked 22k words last year, I think 30k is a reasonable way to let myself raise the bar compared to 2023. Of course, if I exceed that or hit 50k, I certainly won’t complain!
What I’m Doing to Achieve This
Now for the fun part! Just like last year, I’ve gotten various aspects of my surroundings and life ready to allow myself to write more often starting today. For example:
- I’m going to use morning time (at least 20 minutes) to continue writing daily.
- I’ve time blocked more chances on my few days off to write outside of the morning.
- I’m once again tracking my word counts in my bullet journal‘s monthly spread for November.
- My pocket notebooks will once again let me capture creative concepts to implement when I have a chance to write. This year, I’m using a MUJI slim A6 notebook I picked up in Toronto this summer instead of a Field Notes.
- I’ve reopened the relevant parts of my second brain with fleeting creative ideas ready to reference. I’ve been experimenting with working Zettelkasten into Tiago Forte’s PARA and CODE system. (I might write about how that’s working out sometime.)
- I’m still working on it, but I’ve been wrangling with the Windows version of Scrivener under Wine on Linux. This way, I’ll see if I can sync progress between machines and have more possible places to write.
Other than that, it’s going to be a lot of the same as last year. I’m going to focus more on getting words on the page now and editing later. I’m saving the much-needed revising for after the draft is completed, although I have a slightly nebulous idea of how I want the main arcs in the story to go as well.
Let’s Get This Write
Anyway, assuming I don’t get the time to write something else for the site (trust me, I do have some ideas I really want to write about), I’ll definitely be posting an update at the end of this month, whether I succeed or fail. In the meantime, have you participated (or at least thought about the idea) in NaNoWriMo? Did you succeed or not? What about the other lesser-known monthly events that some dedicate to writing novels? Feel free to share. I’m interested in seeing what others think about this event.
Sudo Science 
8 responses to “Another Serious Attempt at NaNoWriMo!”
I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo since 2012. I’ve won a few times, but this is the first year I’ll be doing it away from the official site. The organization’s stance on accepting AI submissions didn’t sit well with me at all, so I’ve decided to take part in writingmonth.org instead. Same deal, but much more minimal.
Honestly, I haven’t been writing much for pleasure this last year. I had at one point gotten into the habit of writing every single day, but that ended last year when I came down with COVID. Since then, it has been very difficult to get that habit back. I write and edit for a living, so it’s difficult to then turn to my own writing and deal with that after staring at words all day long. Last year I think I wrote about 5k words toward the goal. I hope to do better this year. I guess we’ll see. I don’t have the plans you’ve made, which probably doesn’t bode well for success.
That said, it’s day 2 and at least I’ve written some each day. Hope NaNo goes well for you.
Matt
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That’s interesting. I knew you did a lot of reading, but I didn’t know you had participated in NaNo before. I know they’ve had an official site, but I don’t follow all of their rules, so I just make it a personal project each time. The biggest reason being that I’m a bit weary about sharing my unfinished progress with others. If you still have two days of writing so far, I’m sure everything is looking good. Hope you succeed this year as well.
By the way, how exactly do you incorporate AI into NaNo? I’m assuming it’s for small things like dialogue ideas or the revision process, but I’m curious about more details on how I could use AI intentionally without having it do too much.
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They changed the rules to accept fully generated AI content. Their argument was that refusing to accept AI content would be discriminatory against those who can’t write. It pissed many people off.
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And I doubt that people would have been upset if it had just allowed AI editing because that was allowed in previous years. Now it’s for a fully AI generated story.
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Oh, I see. I misunderstood what you meant by that at first. I’m not sure why NaNo would even want fully-generated AI novels. Billy Coull tried to publish a dozen of those in 2023 on Amazon, and they all read like incoherent, loosely-connected trash where the story is told as a long batch of ChatGPT outputs. I don’t see why they would encourage such a thing.
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