Oh, man, good luck! I wish I could do NaNo too this year ):
I found it easiest to aim for a solid 2000 words a day -- it's a nice round number, it's big enough to give you a solid sense of accomplishment but it's small enough to manage, and it gives you those five spare days to type it up. And yeah, if you'll be writing by hand, then you should do the thing where you write a few lines, count the words, divide by number of lines, then divide 50,000 by that number to see how many lines you need to write. Don't stress if you don't do exactly your required amount each day, because sometimes you'll be on a high and doing twice your required amount, and some days it'll be a slog just to get through two-thirds of it. It evens itself out over the course of the month.
Get down at least a basic chapter-by-chapter outline for the plot, but know that it's not the end of the world if you deviate from it -- sometimes stories just morph on you. What I did was sort the plot/subplots into exactly twenty-five sections on the outline, so that I could write a chapter a day and not have to worry too much about picking up again in the middle of a scene. Maybe that would work for you?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 10:46 pm (UTC)I found it easiest to aim for a solid 2000 words a day -- it's a nice round number, it's big enough to give you a solid sense of accomplishment but it's small enough to manage, and it gives you those five spare days to type it up. And yeah, if you'll be writing by hand, then you should do the thing where you write a few lines, count the words, divide by number of lines, then divide 50,000 by that number to see how many lines you need to write. Don't stress if you don't do exactly your required amount each day, because sometimes you'll be on a high and doing twice your required amount, and some days it'll be a slog just to get through two-thirds of it. It evens itself out over the course of the month.
Get down at least a basic chapter-by-chapter outline for the plot, but know that it's not the end of the world if you deviate from it -- sometimes stories just morph on you. What I did was sort the plot/subplots into exactly twenty-five sections on the outline, so that I could write a chapter a day and not have to worry too much about picking up again in the middle of a scene. Maybe that would work for you?