Writing Day 29

Tomorrow is the last day of Nanowrimo, how has it went for you? Did you complete the rough draft of your writing project? If so that’s great, if not don’t worry, the end of Nanowrimo doesn’t establish your deadline. It’s meant to encourage you towards your goal, not to be a barrier. If you haven’t gotten as far as you would have liked, the good news is, you have other options.

Looking for a moment at the average baseline goal of 1,667 words a day with Nanowrimo to write a 50,000 word novel. I’ve mentioned before, many famous novels are less than 50,000 words so that’s not a concern. However, if using 50,000 as a writing goal, did you know that you can write 500 words a day for 100 days and get to 50,000 words?

In other words, just because Nanowrimo is over, doesn’t mean you have to stop writing. The truth is, even if you made it to 50,000 words on November 30 you’re not finished, you’ve just finished the rough draft. Next you have probably at least two rewrites ahead and a grammar edit so if you’re not at 50,000 words now it’s still okay.

What I do hope is that you are not stopping before your writing goal is complete. You may need to adjust your daily projections to make your original goal a reality, but you have options. Just to throw this out there, some can write 1,000 words a day and have a 50,000 word novel in 50 days. The writing calendar is your friend, not a foe, in fact it can be a tool to help you complete your book.

For example, continuing with a 50,000 word count for the purposes of gauging, consider this. If you take 100 days to write 50,000 words with a 12 chapter goal for the book, this means that you would average completing a chapter every 8.5 days. So you would basically write 4.33 chapters each month in that 100 days. Keeping this in mind can help you track your progress.

The 100 Day Writing Calendar, or even the 50 Day Writing Calendar can be an option for you if 30 days was not feasible for the season of life you find yourself in. Or perhaps it’s not that 30 days doesn’t work for you, just that November was the wrong 30 days for you this time. If it did work for you then again congratulations.

Now you can take some time and let your mind rest, then begin evaluating what you have, and what needs to be tweaked, changed or overhauled. Whether your writing day 29 or the 29 of November is your writing day one, it can work for you. It can be the day that your writing saw the breakthrough you needed, to get to the last page of your book, just take it a day at a time.