NaNoWriMo participants aim to finish a 50,000 word novel in a single month – this month, in fact. The NaNoWriMo Website says NaNoWriMo is for, “everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.”

While radical attempts at self-improvement generally don't work – see, for instance, last year's New Year's resolutions – NaNoWriMo's emphasis on alleviating the fears that can block productivity is a good one. NaNoWriMo's reminder, “You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing,” is, in fact, exactly what underproductive writers need to hear.

Even with that sound advice, however, many NaNoWriMo participants never finish – and right about now, when the initial excitement starts to fade, is a danger point. Here are five strategies for making it past the dreaded, “Week Two Doldrums.”

Over the summer, I ran a mini-workshop right here at Savvy Authors that focused on Prose Tightening – trimming the deadwood from your work and paring down all the nonessentials so that your story shines through. Now seems like as good a time as any to revisit some of those key ideas, as well as talk about some others. If you’re finishing up your NaNo project, congratulations! The days in this month are winding down, and soon you’ll have a draft of a novel in front of you. Ready to think about polishing? (Even if you aren’t yet at that stage, go ahead and bookmark this blog post. We’ll be here when you’re ready).

Consider some of these tips when you’re working your way through a second (or third or fourth or, gulp, yes it happens…fifth) draft:

High-concept manuscripts with "crossover" appeal are a hot--albeit elusive--commodity in today's crowded YA market. A book that speaks to adults as well as teens will reach a much wider audience, which usually translates to more copies sold. Authors know this. Agents know this. So why aren't editor inboxes overflowing with crossover novels?

Entangled Publishing receives a lot of YA queries, many of which are fantastic, but we also see quite a few novels pitched as YA when, really, they’re just adult novels with teenage protagonists. I’ve chatted with several of these authors during the rejection (or, in rare instances, revise and resubmit) process, and they’ve all said one of two things:

Like many of my acquaintances, when I heard the news of Anne McCaffrey's death, I paused. Also, like many of my acquaintances, I found out via Twitter. Within moments of reading the news, people from within my social network (and beyond), left expressions of sorrow and loss. From all over the world, I read beautiful and thoughtful statements that revealed the love and appreciation people held for Anne McCaffrey and her stories.

People everywhere spoke of the impact that her stories have on them. On my authors lists, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on LiveJournal, people from all walks of life relayed their love of the stories and how their lives were affected by them.

November is National Writing Month but with the month almost over, are you finishing a book? Did you stop trying to keep up? Or did you do little more than a day or two?

For some the exercise means they have discovered the secret of completing a novel in record time. So - what have you learned?

The answer is simple. If you stuck with it, you learned to set goals. With NaNo the goals are so high, some will give up because they can't keep up. But if they look at why this exercise works so well for so many, they'll see that setting goals helps 'get the job done'.

This month is NaNoWriMo which, as "HowToLiz" would say on her YouTube channel, is a word made up of "Nano" which means "small," and "Wrimo" which is short for wrimocerus. But it actually has nothing to do with small wrimoceruses.

NaNoWriMo is where writers all over the Nation – nay, the world! – go crazy cranking out a novel writing 50,000 words during the month of November. That's it. Write a novel in a month.

Last night, I wrote this incredibly eloquent and well-thought out blog post for this spot here today.

This is not it.

My blog, in all its glorious erudition, is trapped on my computer, which decided to crash and burn without warning this afternoon. Yes, I make copies and backups. I save files obsessively while working on them; I save them to flash drives. I back up everything to an external hard drive. I make use of the online service Dropbox. I just didn’t save this one document this one time. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it gives me the opportunity to say something different.

How many of you as writers have tons of story ideas? Some started. A few thousand words, a few more than that. Some nearly done. Some stories completed but that need a total revamping? Some that are still floating in your head?


What do you do when you can’t seem to focus on one story and finish it?

I love a good mystery, and I love a good romance. If I get both in one story, it’s the best of both worlds, so it’s no surprise that when I first started writing I chose romantic suspense. It never occurred to me to write to the market. I just wrote what I liked to read, and almost immediately, a paranormal element crept into my writing. That shouldn’t have been a surprise either, since I’ve always been fascinated by mysterious things, things that can’t be explained.

About six months after I started my romantic suspense, I got what I thought was a brilliant idea. What if a heroine found someone buried who wasn’t dead? A warrior who was on the verge of saving the world, when he was betrayed and trapped in a time vault that stops time? This sounded fun. I started brainstorming, thinking of all the delicious possibilities. A side note here. I didn’t think of the story as time travel because the hero didn’t travel though time. He merely slept…for 150 years. But I suppose that falls within the time travel guidelines.