This month’s blog hop asks: Do you particpate in NaNoWriMo?

I do! The short answer is, yes, and this is my seventh year and (hopefully) seventh consecutive win!

Long answer, I’ve actually known about (and made several very half-hearted attempts) at NaNo since 2010, but it never really clicked for me until I learned how to plan out and finish a story without NaNo for motivation.

My first real effort and first win came in 2017. Earlier that year, I’d been through edits for my first published novella, Masks, which I had to completely rewrite from the ground up, because I had no idea what I was doing and it was all wrong. I set a deadline with the small press I was working on at the time of four weeks to write a new draft of around 20k words. I achieved that goal! This is what ultimately led me to think maybe, just maybe, I could do that NaNo thing, so long as I had some sort of plan.

I was always a panster before that, and for me, that was part of the problem. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pantsing a draft, and I still do this mostly for short stories, because them being smaller usually means I can keep the vision all in my head without needing to make notes. I believe that even if you’re a pantser, you can still have a plan! That doesn’t mean you need some detailed outline like a planner has, just that you should have some sort of notes for yourself ahead of time. For my first few NaNoWriMo wins, all I had for the projects I wrote was a notes file that was just a list of every scene I knew I wanted to write, in roughly chronlogical order, and just that was enough! It was still more than sufficient for me to race to the finish without issues, with plenty of room for my pantsing mind to veer off on tangents as it pleased.

So, my biggest and most important piece of advice for new to NaNo people is always have some sort of plan! After all, if you sit down to write and have no idea what you actually want to write, it’s way harder to put words on the page.

Good luck to everyone NaNoing this month!

Drop a comment or come interact with me on social media, @AmaraJLynn.

Check out the rest of the participants in the blog hop here!