NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) ended last night as writers around the world counted a collective total of 3,073,176,540 words this year–273 million more words than last year.

As these writers toiled away, we published daily links to writing tools and tips. We’ve collected the individual posts below–the advice will work all year round.

Here is our final piece of advice: Take a break and then edit like crazy. Remember your NaNoWriMo manuscript is just a draft and it takes  A LOT more work to publish.

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

National Novel Writing Month reinforces the most basic and important aspect of any working writer’s life: Keep writing every day.

Now that NaNoWriMo has concluded, you should continue writing every day. If you are really ambitious, one Reddit user created a spreadsheet to track your daily writing after NaNoWriMo. You can also follow Easily Mused’s example and keep a writing journal about your daily progress.

Check it out: “I’m just suggesting you use a writing journal (or even a section in your writer’s notebook or on your blog) to note your moods, give yourself pep talks, or blow off some steam.  You can use it to: Set goals, celebrate accomplishments, and write about your feelings. Make it a word, a sentence, or answer a question: How did it go today? Did you meet your goals or set any new ones? Kill anyone off in you WIP?”

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As you finish your National Novel Writing Month manuscript this week, there is one very very very important thing to remember: You need to edit your work before you even consider publishing it.

To get the editing started, you should join a novel swap. On the NaNoWriMo forums, writers around the world will swap novels for critiques, fresh ideas and support.

Here’s more: “Think of this forum like a dating site for novels and readers. You’ve got a novel and you want some feedback, so this is the place to put up a personal ad to find someone who’d like give it a test drive. You may also want to read some other novels and give feedback. There is no obligation to share your novel if you’re just here giving feedback. Please limit your posting of your work to 5 pages or 1,500 words, whichever is less.”

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As you near the end of your National Novel Writing Month manuscript, you should check the online Onomatopoeia Dictionary to spice up your climactic car chase, sword fight or dramatic confrontation.

The amazing resource words for sounds has sections on eating & drinking, explosions, music, animals and much, much more. If you need a refresher, watch the Winnie-the-Pooh video embedded above for a definition of onomatopoeia.

Here’s more from the site: “Onomatopoeia (words that imitate sound) is prominent in comics. There is a dictionary of onomatopoeia in comics, entitled: “Ka-boom”, by Kevin J. Taylor, and a website. Much of the onomatopoeia in comics is not used outside the world of comics. Also, some words are used by only one author. Although this website does feature a few words from comics, it gravitates towards words found in other literature.”

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Have you run out of ideas for your National Novel Writing Month project? Why not adopt an orphan plot, setting, character or idea from another writer?

At the NaNoWriMo Adoption Society, you can Adopt a Romantic line, Adopt a Running Gag, Adopt a Closing line and many more helpful items.

This is our twenty-seventh NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. As writers around the country join the writing marathon this month, we will share one piece of advice or writing tool to help you cope with this daunting project.

With the Internet, email and blogs like GalleyCat constantly clamoring for your attention, many National Novel Writing Month writers switch to the most popular distraction-free writing tool: writing by hand.

If you switch, you might want to meet fellow hand-writers at the NaNoWriMo handwriting support group.

This is our twenty-sixth NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. As writers around the country join the writing marathon this month, we will share one piece of advice or writing tool to help you cope with this daunting project. (Photo via vignetfishnet)

After 26 days of writing, your brain could use some warm-up stretches. In the Role Playing and Communal World Building forum, you can “build worlds, develop characters, and create new plots with the many interesting fellow writers on the forums.”

In this area, you can enroll your characters in an Alternate Universe High School or Break the Fourth Wall or play Cops and Robbers.

This is our twenty-fifth NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. As writers around the country join the writing marathon this month, we will share one piece of advice or writing tool to help you cope with this daunting project.

As the end of NaNoWriMo nears, you might want to find some support from local writers. Visit the writing marathon’s official regional forums page to discover writers in your neighborhood.

Check it out: “If you’re looking for local participants, we have a place for you! If you’ll look under NaNo Near You, you’ll find the regional forums, where you can find local Wrimos and arrange meetups on a closer scale.Any local/regional group should be posted in its nearest regional lounge.”

This is our twenty-fourth NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. As writers around the country join the writing marathon this month, we will share one piece of advice or writing tool to help you cope with this daunting project.

Feeling trapped in the setting of your National Novel Writing Month manuscript?

Use the free Globe Genie application to take a Google Maps visit to random places around the world–you might find the inspirational location you need for your next scene.  Follow this link to take the application for a test drive.

This is our twenty-second NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. As writers around the country join the writing marathon this month, we will share one piece of advice or writing tool to help you cope with this daunting project. (Via Reddit)

 

Artist and writer Svenja has created a free set of Excel spreadsheets you can use to track your characters, chapters, word count and progress in a single place.

Check it out: “I finally finished updating last year’s word count tracker for NaNoWriMo! I made several different designs and several different formats, because I tend to get a bit carried away with Microsoft Excel. So, here’s the full pack, containing nine different designs … Each file contains several sheets – instructions, word tracker, a progress chart, sheets for filling in your novel info, chapter lists, and character lists, as well as sections for developing plot and characters. If you don’t need all that, just delete them! If you don’t want all the extra designs, I also uploaded the single, updated version of last year’s NaNo word tracker - here’s the download page.”

This is our twenty-second NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. As writers around the country join the writing marathon this month, we will share one piece of advice or writing tool to help you cope with this daunting project.