NaNoWriMo 2023 Early Prep

So last year I took part in NaNoWriMo 2022 where I successfully wrote 50,000 words in November, 28 days to be exact. This allowed me to get a beautiful start to my first ever manuscript, however reading it back recently to prepare for this year's NaNoWriMo I realised that it needs a lot of work. So I’ve decided to start early on my prep so that I have a very good base to write my next 50,000 words on my WIP.

I decided that the easiest way to do this is to take each chapter and copy paste it into a text to speech page so that I can listen while I take notes on what I have written so far. You should see my notes so far… I am very critical of my own work so far.

But rereading my novel is only one step in my prepping journey, I also need to take note of everything that is in my folder and realise what I’ve missed out from my zero draft and fit everything into a nice conclusive first draft. I call it my zero draft, inspired by many of the AuthorTubers I watch on YouTube, because it's literally the barebones of a story so far and on the second write through I actually fit all the pieces together. I need to make sure that I have all of the correct pieces of information so that when I start editing in December I can have plenty of wiggle room to take out huge chunks of writing where necessary.

So as well as that I want to prepare so that I can develop my characters and locations better. I realised in the first time going around I didn’t describe any settings or my characters even though I wrote extensive pages of information, most of which would never need to be told in the book, about every single person in my story and every single place the characters go. Most of this is for my so that I can know exactly who or what I’m writing about but when doing NaNoWriMo I didn’t write any of this. I can chalk this up to me needing to reach a target of words in a target of days and so I was just getting words on paper.

I can’t complain though because before I had but a folder of random scenes, character profiles, drawings of locations and a blank document.

So in my second time taking part in NaNoWriMo I intend to take my time a lot more and spend more of my time actually going back and adding in scene development instead of just spewing everything onto the page in a Primary school level of writing which is just going to make me sit there and cringe when I’ going back to read it.

Every single chapter needs a lot of work and I think now that I have the experience of taking part last year I know what I can do better this year to make the experience more worthwhile for me this time.

To anyone that wants to take part in NaNoWriMo I would highly recommend it, even if the goal you have isn’t to write a book. You could write 50,000 words over the span of multiple articles for NaNoWriMo and you would have so much new content for your individual profiles by the end of it.

Plus I think having a little community of writers to motivate you and keep your head in the game is a huge help so make sure to have a really good community of support on your journey!

It’s really early but to anyone taking part in November… good luck!