I've heard it said that if you have trouble sleeping you should designate your bed as a 'sleep only' zone. So no reading, watching tv, etc while sitting or laying in bed. The idea is that if you are only ever in your bed when you're sleeping then your brain associates it very strongly with going to sleep and will go into sleep mode when you lay down. Based on this I made myself a writing corner for November. I designated a chair where I would sit whenever possible, and I put another chair next to it where I kept certain things. Ideally, I would only sit there when I was writing so that it would become my writing zone, that didn't exactly happen, but I tried to sit elsewhere when I was doing other things.
Here's a quick pic I snapped before cleaning it up:
Obviously that isn't the chair I sat in, that's the 'place for important stuff chair.' Always right by my side I had:
- Water - keep it full, refilling your water is an excellent excuse to take a break and stretch your legs
- Headphones in case I needed to drown out household noise
- Vitamins - particularly vitamin C, don't need to be getting sick at a time like this
- Chapstick
- Hand lotion - along with the 'writing corner' idea I tried to associate smells with writing as well, so I used the same chapstick and the same hand lotion while I was writing so that I would associate that smell with thinking creatively. Not sure how much of an effect it had, but again, taking a quick break to massage your cramping hands every now and then is nice.
I had bought some incentive snacks, but I ended up giving them to myself so sparingly that I had about half of what I bought left at the end of the month. I didn't even get that much, I was just like 'you can have 5 chocolate covered raisins when you finish these next 1000 words.' so it really lasted a long time.
I tried to listen to the same music when I wrote to help get into the zone as well. I had a long playlist so that it wouldn't get overwhelmingly boring, but I pretty much did just listen to that whenever I wrote.
I did not have a strict outline or detailed character profiles written up before hand. At first I felt a bit lost without them, but as I went on things began to change so much that I was glad that I didn't waste my time making an outline of events.
During October I tried to get some things done which would normally have been on my November to do list. I think I underestimated the amount of time I would have for assorted little tasks, however it was really nice to not have to worry about these things. i.e. I completed all my choreography for my dance classes in October which saved me from a ton of last minute stress.
The biggest thing I did ahead of time was prepare my etsy shop. I had about 25-30 listings written up and saved as drafts so that I could list them really quickly. This was very worth it. I put away all my dyeing supplies and told myself that I could not dye anymore until December cause even just trying one little idea out would inevitably have blossomed into an entire day worth of dyeing.
I tried to cut out unnecessary stuff like cleaning my room which actually didn't turn out as bad as it seemed. My room looked like I had pretty much dropped everything I used during the month in the middle of the floor or on my desk which was basically true, but it really didn't take that long to set straight. It ended up just being a lot of clutter rather than a real mess that required deep cleaning.
Conveniently, November is also no shave November. So if you're into that kindof thing, definitely take advantage of the coinciding 'themes' of the month. It's really one of the only good reasons I can think of to have NaNo in November, it's just not a good month for something like this in any other way.
I've been trying to lengthen the amount of time between hair washings, so I began spreading it out more in October so that by November I only washed my hair four times during the month. It really cuts down on shower time when you don't need to wash your hair every shower. I'm working on a post with more details about my hair care theory so I'll talk about this more then.
Overall, I think the key is just to be consistent, disciplined and set good goals and schedules. I worked fairly steadily throughout the month. My strategy was to get more done on weekends which worked well. I was below the target word count line on the graph on my profile for pretty much the entirety of the second and third weeks, but never very far behind. I basically wrote in almost all my free time during the month, but I didn't have to stay up super late or stress out about it as long as I was disciplined to sit down and get to work when I had time.
That being said, I can't imagine doing this while in college and there seem to be a huge amount of college students doing it. It was very manageable for me in my current situation to complete 50,000 words as long as I stayed focused, I thought it would be more difficult. Not that I want to do this every month or anything, but it was fun to be committed to the one project all month. I did miss knitting and spinning a lot though. I managed to get some knitting done by carrying it around with me and working on it while I was out and couldn't write.
We'll see what next November brings. I think I was pretty well prepared this year, there isn't really anything major that I can think of that I would have done differently in preparation. It might have been nice to have a list of character and location names to pull from. I spent quite a bit of time naming things and some were just taking too long and they have placeholders so that I didn't have to waste time looking for the perfect name.
During October I tried to get some things done which would normally have been on my November to do list. I think I underestimated the amount of time I would have for assorted little tasks, however it was really nice to not have to worry about these things. i.e. I completed all my choreography for my dance classes in October which saved me from a ton of last minute stress.
The biggest thing I did ahead of time was prepare my etsy shop. I had about 25-30 listings written up and saved as drafts so that I could list them really quickly. This was very worth it. I put away all my dyeing supplies and told myself that I could not dye anymore until December cause even just trying one little idea out would inevitably have blossomed into an entire day worth of dyeing.
I tried to cut out unnecessary stuff like cleaning my room which actually didn't turn out as bad as it seemed. My room looked like I had pretty much dropped everything I used during the month in the middle of the floor or on my desk which was basically true, but it really didn't take that long to set straight. It ended up just being a lot of clutter rather than a real mess that required deep cleaning.
Conveniently, November is also no shave November. So if you're into that kindof thing, definitely take advantage of the coinciding 'themes' of the month. It's really one of the only good reasons I can think of to have NaNo in November, it's just not a good month for something like this in any other way.
I've been trying to lengthen the amount of time between hair washings, so I began spreading it out more in October so that by November I only washed my hair four times during the month. It really cuts down on shower time when you don't need to wash your hair every shower. I'm working on a post with more details about my hair care theory so I'll talk about this more then.
Overall, I think the key is just to be consistent, disciplined and set good goals and schedules. I worked fairly steadily throughout the month. My strategy was to get more done on weekends which worked well. I was below the target word count line on the graph on my profile for pretty much the entirety of the second and third weeks, but never very far behind. I basically wrote in almost all my free time during the month, but I didn't have to stay up super late or stress out about it as long as I was disciplined to sit down and get to work when I had time.
That being said, I can't imagine doing this while in college and there seem to be a huge amount of college students doing it. It was very manageable for me in my current situation to complete 50,000 words as long as I stayed focused, I thought it would be more difficult. Not that I want to do this every month or anything, but it was fun to be committed to the one project all month. I did miss knitting and spinning a lot though. I managed to get some knitting done by carrying it around with me and working on it while I was out and couldn't write.
We'll see what next November brings. I think I was pretty well prepared this year, there isn't really anything major that I can think of that I would have done differently in preparation. It might have been nice to have a list of character and location names to pull from. I spent quite a bit of time naming things and some were just taking too long and they have placeholders so that I didn't have to waste time looking for the perfect name.
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