This November is the 16th
National Novel Writing Month, and despite the name it is an international event -- which you are going to do on your own. Yes, you are. Before the end of December, you're going to have written a novel. It won't be the longest novel in the world, but it will be longer than you've ever written before. It's unlikely to be the best novel in the world, either, but if you've never done one before, this is going to be best you've ever written.
There are an awful lot of maxims in writing, primarily because it's easier to come up with snappy, Hallmark Card philosophical soundbites than it is write anything, but some of them are true. Such as this one: "the worst thing you ever wrote is better than the best thing you didn't." You may go around knowing you've got a great novel in you, but that's nonsense unless you actually write it down. All NaNoWriMo aims to do is get words out of you.
Specifically, 50,000 words. It doesn't matter if the prose isn't so great that John Irving weeps, Donna Tartt takes up astrophysics, and Stephen King moves to sitcoms. It actually -- whisper it -- doesn't matter if you write the same word 50,000 times. You wouldn't be able to look us in the face, but you could copy and paste one word that many times, and save yourself some typing.
What will really happen, though, is that you'll start by dividing 50,000 into 30 so that you can reckon how many words that is per day. It's about 1,667. That doesn't look so bad. You'll figure you can do that. Possibly you'll "accidentally" postpone thinking about it until November 2 when, gosh darn it, you're just too late, maybe next year. Usually, though, you will start the month with gusto and then stumble a few days into it when, did you know, suddenly 1,667 words is an awful lot? Many and perhaps most people stop there, a week into it like it was a New Year's Resolution, but others will press on, and some will finish.
You should be one of the ones who finishes. You should be one of the ones who have written 50,000 words by December. We should be telling you how to exploit all those Apple devices you've got but, hey, we gave you the copy and paste tip. Other than that one, there is no quick-fix app that will actually get you more time or make you think up more words. Yet there are many that will help, and they are tools that will last you far beyond November.
Scrivener
There isn't really a prize for succeeding at NaNoWriMo, but the organisers do call you a winner, and alongside the totally-justified pride you get, this year you also get a great deal on Scrivener for Mac OS X or Windows.
For the duration of NaNoWriMo, you can use Scrivener for free and if you win, then you get to buy it for half price. If you don't make it to the 50,000 word total then you still get 20 percent off it.
Between ourselves, Scrivener is not an expensive app: at full price, the Mac and PC ones cost $45 each. Plus it is regularly on sale; we've been trying to remember, and we think we got our copies at around $22 apiece. So it's not a gigantic financial incentive, especially not as you're going to find that Scrivener is worth so much more to you, but it's a good deal. It's also smart work from the makers Literature & Latte, though we say that in part just so that we can just say the name Literature & Latte.
They call the software "a complete writers' studio," rather than a word processor. We've used Scrivener for non-fiction book writing, and they're right. It is a true boon for handling large documents, for organizing your words and your research, and for focusing in on the current chapter, or out on the whole project.
We only have two things against Scrivener, and one of them won't concern you for NaNoWriMo at all. It's that when you've written your book and are sending it out to someone, producing a PDF or e-book version is surprisingly intricate work. The other thing, though, is that there isn't an iPad version.
If you work for Literature & Latte, then you just said aloud "oh, here we go again," because it is now impossible to mention Scrivener without mentioning that there isn't an iPad one. One is coming, but it has been coming for a long time, and actually new Scrivener rival Ulysses's single greatest advantage is that it does work on both Mac and iPad. The day that Literature & Latte finally releases the iPad version of Scrivener is the day that their servers melt from demand.
Still, as superb as it is to be able to pick up your iPad and continue working on your novel in Ulysses, we recommend Scrivener. Ulysses is the clear winner in terms of a more modern look and feel, too, but at the moment Scrivener wins for sheer features and functions. Get it, open up a blank document, and start writing your 1,667 words for the day.
Write on the move
If you prefer to write in Pages or Microsoft Word, go right ahead -- and you have the advantage that you've got those on all your devices. We genuinely have begun a sentence on our iPhones, and finished it on our Macs after we'd made some tea. Maybe you don't have those, though, or maybe you don't want to write in them because Word is the thing you do all those endless management reports in. It's not conducive to fiction writing that you've always got a File/Open Recent list of the documents you should be writing instead.
Try this instead. On your iPhone or iPad, get our greatly-recommended
Drafts 4. When you get a moment, open that, and immediately start writing today's words. The app has a word count, but it also hides your previous work. Whenever you open it up, you get a blank page ready for the next thing you're writing. You can get back any previous writing, it doesn't throw them away, and you can in fact put your iPhone down for a minute. Put it down for two minutes, though, and Drafts will open up at that blank page again.
We just find the knowledge that it will do this is enough to keep us writing. Then when you're done for the day, you can leave it all in Drafts, or you can save it somewhere else. With a single tap of a button, you can be emailing those words to someone, or you can be saving them to Evernote,
et al. With a bit of preparation, you can be sending the text to Simplenote, where you can edit on your Mac. Or you could be posting the text to your blog -- but don't. That counts as publishing, or at least enough so that sometimes writing contests won't look at your novel.
Don't forget to write
If only you had someone to tap you on the shoulder and say now, come on, you could be writing, you know. Settle for a tap on your wrist or your pocket instead. If you have a commute every morning, before you head out of the door, tell Siri: "Remind me to write when I leave here." Before you reach your subway train, tap, tap, it's time to write.
Don't do that if you drive to work, though. Instead, say: "remind me to write when I get to work" or the frankly prehistoric "remind me to write at lunchtime."
Something people don't realize you can do with Siri is use location reminders for where you already are. Not for when you leave but for when you come back. So as you have breakfast, say "remind me to write when I get home" and even though you're at home right now, Siri won't remind you until you've left, and then come back.
There is something different about being reminded to do this by a device instead of a person. On the bad side, you can ignore it a lot easier than you can a friend. Yet on the good side, when you're looking at your iPhone to see what that notification is, you are looking at the very device you could be using to write. You're practically writing already.
Time-based solutions
The advantage and the simple cleverness of NaNoWriMo is this business of how you only have to write 1,667 words each day to keep up, and it's keeping up that gets you to the novel length. If you need more, or you just have very limited time to concentrate on, you could try the Pomodoro technique as well. It's a productivity method that means you decide you will work flat-out for 25 minutes, take a break for 5, then back to the 25, and so on.
There are many apps for this, so many -- and none that we especially recommend over any other -- that you should just check out the App Store if you think this will help you. We needed to tell you about these, but we feel that it's an extra layer of pressure on you, and so it's something you can look at after NaNoWriMo. For you are going to continue writing afterwards, aren't you?
Get your back up
If you are writing on Drafts 4, Pages, Word or just about any modern word processor, then your work is constantly being saved for you. Yet if someone stole your iPhone just as you wrote the most marvellous sentence, then you must be sure that you've got a copy of all your writing somewhere.
Get your text back to your Mac in any way you choose, and it will be included in OS X's Time Machine backup, if you use that, or online services such as Backblaze. If the worst comes to the worst, email the text to yourself, too. Just remember to back it up somehow, because losing 50,000 words of fiction is not a day that songs will be sung about.
You never want to lose anything you've written, but the entire aim of NaNoWriMo is to get words out of you and onto paper, or onto the screen. Once they're there, you can work on them. Another true writers' maxim is that it is easier to change something than it is to write from scratch. Get the words down. They don't have to be great (yet). That's all you've got to do.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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