Plan to Win

For a children’s writer, writing 50,000 words in one month is a lot. In fact, it is more than the average number of words in a middle-grade book. I’m not the fastest writer in the world, so I needed to do something to make sure I’d win NaNoWriMo 2009. (Stephanie and Kitty can say Pshaw! to winning this year because they have already won in other years. I had no such luxury.)

I planned my work and worked my plan. About mid-month I thought I was going to die. I decided that I had to win this one so that I never had to do NaNo again. Now? Sure, I’d be willing to give NaNo another go!

Here was my battle plan:

1. Outline before November.
2. Write more than the minimum each day.
3. Prepare the family.
4. Plan no other events for the month.
5. Automatically say “No” to people.
6. Plan rewards.

Here is what happened:

1. Outlined one children’s novel. Used note cards. Highly recommend this! If you read my blog of Michael Stackpole’s NaNo advice you may recall he suggested writing one chapter a day. My note cards pretty much came out to one chapter a day for that novel. I say for that novel because, as a children’s writer, I had to work on two manuscripts to add up to the 50,000 words. (As I learned from last year.)

The first 2.5 weeks were outlined and went smoothly. I spent less time thinking about what I was going to write and more time actually writing. The hardest part was forcing myself to write to the word count. The last weeks, working on my non-outlined novel, felt more disjointed, patchy, and somewhat flaky. I really like the story (done the panster way—Stephanie will be proud!), but I should have outlined it. Now I’ve got a bit of a mess to clean up.

2. I wrote about 2,000 words a day near the beginning to build up some cushion. I liked that my word count graph stayed ahead of the NaNo chart. I want to be a writer who can deliver before the deadline. This was good practice.

3. My family was on board. My kids signed up for the Young Writers’ Program. They went strong for the first two weeks before they petered out. They are both proud of the stories they wrote. My husband’s expectations for the month were so low that he was happy when I didn’t completely disappear into another world.

4. I managed to attend no extra events in November except for one baby shower and Thanksgiving.

5. No one asked me to do anything! Could it be the blank stare plastered to my face as I walked around? Or the fact that I let all calls go to the answering machine?

6. My rewards? Mid-month I bought some books. At the end (after finishing 2 days early) I went to a book signing. Debbie Macomber has written a great nonfiction book called Knit Together. I got her to sign it. Below is a picture of her talking about her latest book, One Simple Act, Discovering the Power of Generosity. Note the uber-fan in the front taking pictures. She took about 30.

I’ll end with a quote from my “reward.” I just now flipped through some pages and this caught my eye. Debbie is talking about a revelation she had about her writing:

I could no longer afford to dream of being a writer someday. I could no longer stuff my dreams into the future with a long list of justifications. Life holds no guarantees. I realized then that it was time for me to move my life purpose forward. It was time to go after my dream.

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