NaNoWriMo Week 1 – Goals and Rewards – A Guest Blog by Shanna Swendson

Introductory note: Shanna Swendson’s book Once Upon Stilettos, book two in her series, is on my stack of Keep-Me-Motivated-During-NaNoWriMo books. I’ve been holding off reading it and now that NaNo is here, I’m finally released to dive into that stack. (I’m writing a middle-grade novel with magic realism elements. Shanna’s book, though a woman’s romance, is part of my writing plan because it has the magic realism. So even though to my husband it looks like I’m playing, I’m really not. It’s all work.)

A guest blog by Shanna Swendson:

http://www.shannaswendson.com/

The nice thing about participating in an organized writing challenge like NaNoWriMo is that the goal and deadline are set for you — 50,000 words of a novel by the end of November 30. That goal may seem daunting — 50 times worse than in high school when you had to write a 1,000-word essay and ended up having to stick a “very” before every adjective. Or that deadline may seem so far away that you’re not particularly stressed or motivated by it in the early weeks. The trick to tackling this kind of project is to break that goal and deadline down into chunks.

Start by dividing that word count by the number of days you expect to be able to write in the month. Be realistic about this. For instance, if you’re hosting a dozen relatives for Thanksgiving dinner (and I bet it was a man who came up with the idea of writing a book in a month that contains a major shopping/cooking/travel/hosting holiday), you’re probably not going to get any writing done that day, so don’t count on it. If you do manage to squeeze out a few words while everyone else is watching football or in a turkey coma, then it’s a bonus, but if you’re not counting on working that day you won’t feel like you’ve failed for not getting any work done.

That gives you a target word count for the day. You don’t have to worry about writing 50,000 words, just the 2,000 or so (probably fewer) you need to write that day. If you go over or under for a day, then you might want to recalculate your daily goal based on the number of words remaining and the number of remaining working days. If you’ve gone over, that lowers your target daily goal so that it’s even less daunting. If you’ve gone under, then that makes it clear what you need to do to catch up. Even if I’ve gone over and lowered my daily goal, I like to try to keep aiming at the original daily goal because that means I’ve got a cushion in case something comes up. I usually start a project with great enthusiasm, so it’s nice to feel like I’m ahead when I get bogged down in the middle. Or you may start slowly and pick up steam as you warm up and get in a groove, so you may want to adjust your daily goals to reflect that so you don’t get discouraged.

If you’ve got goals, you also need rewards. Think of something you want to do or get, and make that your reward for finishing. It may help to find a way to visually represent it and post that somewhere near your workspace — the ad for the movie you’ll go see, the new hairstyle you’ll get, the new shoes you’ll buy, etc. Then there are daily incentives. I like to think of something I want to do that day, and I’m not allowed to do it until I reach my daily production goal. That may mean recording your favorite TV show and not watching it until you’re done or getting extra reading time if you finish work earlier.

And then you can give yourself tiny rewards. Divide your daily goal into fractions — like a hundred or two hundred words or figure out how many pages your daily goal averages out to be in your manuscript format — and then put the appropriate number of candy pieces in a dish. Go with something small like M&Ms, Reese’s Pieces, Skittles, gummi dots, etc. If you’re being good, go with something a little healthier, like almonds, Goldfish crackers or raisins (but that’s not nearly as fun). If you’re really watching what you eat, count out some of those stick-on foil stars. Then as you reach each tiny milestone, you get to eat a treat or stick a star on your forehead (or a piece of paper or posterboard). So you get a nice little treat to serve as an incentive for sticking to your work as well as a visual reminder of how much more you have to do. You get to watch your dish grow emptier as you make progress.

Be sure to record your progress, either into a web site word counter or just on a piece of paper you keep near your computer. Use a red thermometer like in fundraising campaigns, gold stars, stickers or anything else that allows you to feel a sense of accomplishment and progress toward your goal. When things get tough mid-way through (when that always seems to happen to me), remind yourself of your goal and why you want to achieve it. Then get back to work.