How I prepared for NaNoWriMo July 2022

What is NaNoWriMo?

If you follow me on social media, you probably have already heard me talking about NaNoWriMo. I can imagine that my non-writer followers have absolutely no clue what this means. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Every year in November writers from all over the world come (virtually) together to write or continue in any way or form (outlining, worldbuilding, editing, etc) their writing work in progress, or for short, wip.

The goal is to complete the challenge of writing 50k words in 30 days. If you did, you win. There are also other times on which writers participate in NaNoWriMo, the so-called ‘camps’. You have one in July and April, for which you can set your own word count goal, i.e. it doesn’t have to be 50k. I plan to participate in July for the first time and write 40k during that month.

My NaNoWriMo preparations

To be able to win the challenge, it is important to be prepared, so you can only focus on writing. Most authors plot their story beforehand, because you don’t have any time during NaNoWriMo to outline your story, except of course if that is your NaNoWriMo goal all along.

I have finished my outline using the Save The Cat method, explained by book coach Savannah Gilbo. This method divides your story into scenes instead of chapters. And there are numerous advantages of using scenes, which I listed in my previous blog post. Using scenes and the Save The Cat outline allows me to clearly see where my story is headed and writing it becomes a little bit more straightforward.

In addition to my outline, I also signed up for the official NaNoWriMo website, where you can enter you personal word count goal and earn badges for each goal that you achieve. It makes the progress more fun and you have something to hold you accountable while you write.

My word count goal

As I already said, my word count goal is 40k. I deliberately didn’t set 50k as my goal because I wanted to avoid pressuring myself too much to write. If I feel pressured to do something or if I must do something, I don’t anymore, and that would be a pity, as I have already invested quite some of my time into this story.

Also, besides setting my word count goal, I also need a writing schedule. That tells me how much words I need to write every day to achieve my goal. If we take 40k words and divide them into 31 days, you get 1290 words. This means that I have to write that amount of words every day to win the NaNoWriMo challenge. If you want to keep updated on my process, you can follow my Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

To all other authors who participate, good luck!