Why Writing 50K in 30 Days Feels Hard, and How to Do It Anyway
Get out of your head and back into the story.
If you’re a novelist, you have likely heard of NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month. Held every November, this is when writers all around the world buckle down with a challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. If you’ve never heard of NaNoWriMo, you can read about it here:
The benefits of NaNoWriMo is that it forces writers to get out of their own heads and just put pen to paper (or more realistically, fingers to keys), slamming out a story without thinking too hard about it. However, that’s also one of the biggest challenges — getting out of your own way and writing the damn story. But that’s only one of the challenges. Here are a few more I’ve experienced on my way to 50K, and how I’ve overcome them:
Falling Behind
The easiest way to plan on writing 50K in 30 days is to break it up by the day. 1,667 words per day, to be exact. If you keep to that number every day, you’ll definitely reach 50K by November 30. If you skip a day or don’t reach your daily goal, that daily number increases. Skip more than one day, and that bite-sized chunk of words becomes a mouthful.
But let’s be honest — life happens. There are going to be days when writing isn’t possible for a variety of reasons — not enough time, inspiration, or energy, just to name a few. It’s easy to plan for 1,667 words a day on November 1. But after two weeks of this, it can feel really hard to keep the momentum.
If you’ve fallen behind in your word count, there is still time to make it up — but it’s going to take some work on your part. One way is to recalculate the words you have to write each day by taking the number of words left to reach 50K, divided by the number of days left in the month. Then commit to writing that amount of words a day. Another way is to use your days off to cram in more words than usual and pad your word count.
