NaNoWriMo begins the day after tomorrow. To control my progress, I’ve created a spreadsheet that dynamically recomputes, each day, how many words I need to write in order to stay on track.

This is a method I’ve used before, based on principles used to manage software projects. Because software projects have a lot in common with writing projects. Most notably, they’re both creative endeavors, and you never know at the beginning how the project is going to look at the end. A write could use any of the widely available Agile software-development project tools out there. But this is a lighter weight tool, a simple spreadsheet, which doesn’t have as many features, but I’ve found it sufficient for a one-person writing project (like a NaNoWriMo novel).

Here’s a link to my NaNoWriMo Progress Sheet (OpenOffice Calc), or in MS Excel format. (Right-click on the link, and save the file to your hard drive.)

Here’s how it looks:

I have 7 more scenes to write to complete From the Ashes of Courage, and most of those are epilogue. Today, I penned over 4,000 words, straight through the black moment, and now I’m perched on the other side. I decided to stop for the day after the following paragraph, which just about made me cry:

I’m also discovering that this story is emotionally exhausting to write, because it’s such a powerful story. This is the first story I’ve written in which I really think I can empathize with my female point-of-view character. In the past, I’ve written female POV characters by imagining a situation that would make me as a man feel and think similarly to my female character, and then translate. But that trick can only take you so far. Eventually, you run into situations that have no analogue in the opposite sex. At that point, you simply have to put yourself in your female (or if you’re a woman, male) character’s shoes, and write what she experiences and what she feels.

On the other hand, NaNoWriMo is a fun event for many people. And it spurs some to become writers, rather than just talking about maybe writing someday. And it does increase the efficiency, and even the efficacy, of some writers. Because NaNoWriMo imposes a deadline, as well as social pressure to meet the deadline. Both of these can be very effective.

The thing you have to remember is that NaNoWriMo is a sprint, as opposed to a marathon. It’s a lot of energy, a lot of speed, dumping a lot of words, fast, for a short period of time. And it doesn’t encompass the whole novel-writing process, either. There’s a significant amount of planning you should do, which you ideally should be almost finished with by now. And afterward, there’s at least one editing pass, maybe two (story revision and line editing).

So in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, here are a number of tips for completing NaNoWriMo, taken from my own experience as a writer and culled from other writers around the Internet:

As you may know, I’ve never been able to get through a Nora Roberts novel. I’ve always gotten bored or otherwise lost interest. So then why would I say that I want to write like her?

It’s not a joke. I seriously admire Nora Roberts as an author, even though her fiction is not for me. Here’s why.

Look at Nora Roberts’s history as a writer, even from the very beginning. She got started in 1979, when she first put pencil to paper, literally, to write a novel:

I agree with him on NaNoWriMo. I agree with him except on one point. I think writers do write every day. Maybe you don’t always write words for your novel, but you write something that isn’t email. Maybe it’s an article, or an editorial, or maybe it’s pre-writing for your novel. Or maybe “writing” just means planning on your novel–although I’d be very careful with that one, because “planning” can be a wonderful source of procrastination, which is not writing.

In my view, either I’m a writer, and I write consistently. Or I’m not a writer, and I don’t. Therefore, churning out a novel before the end of the day May 10, that exercise does not make me a writer. Just a few hundred words each and every day, that does make me a writer. This misperception many writers and aspiring writers seem to have. It’s as if they think they need to push themselves to the limit in order to get enough time for writing, and that requires something like NaNoWriMo or 70 Days of Sweat.

Or else there’s some lure in the idea that, if you just buckle down and do it, you could actually write a novel in only a month (or 2½ months). I think that’s the wrong attitude to take. Rather, look at it this way: If you can spend just 10 or 20 minutes each day writing, you can finish a complete novel in under a year. That’s right, if you really want to be a writer, you don’t have to give up your life. You don’t have to “find time,” because you can probably find 10 or 20 minutes easily enough. (More on that in a sec.)