As we hit the middle of NaNoWriMo, many of you are shooting for your 1,667 – 2,000 words per day and trying to meet your deadlines. Fear of falling behind and the constant, looming sense that you aren’t writing fast enough dogs many writers at this point in the process, and I want to step back, take a breath, and talk about something you can take forward with you into the rest of the month and, more importantly, into the rest of the year outside of NaNoWriMo.
One of the looming concerns writers face, regardless of NaNo, is burnout. Most writers are working at least one job, many have children to raise, and life to lead. The majority of us aren’t lucky enough to be able to make our creativity our full time job at this point. Some people have no desire to be a full time writer and are just putting books out into the world to satisfy their creative urge. This constant push/pull of needs, scheduling, time, and pressure is one of the quickest ways to burnout and exhaustion.
Heck, regardless of writing, people are burning out like a sparkler left out in the rain these days. Financial pressures, political anxiety, climate change, the inability to make things meet, and the pandemic (which still isn’t over, by the way) all come together to create this awful cloud that hangs over all of us. The world is a tense, stressful, exhausting place these days, and just existing in this constant state of stress is enough to cause anyone to want to scream into the void.
So how do we add writing to that without tempting burnout?
The key is to cultivate healthy practices around your writing. The principles I’m going to be talking about here could be used for a lot of other things in life, too. What are these principles, you ask? Well…
Set healthy goals for yourself
For some people, 1,667 words a day is just too many to be sustainable, whether you participate in NaNoWriMo or not. For a large percentage of professionals, we look for around 1,000 words a day (two Word pages, single spaced, more or less). However, that number is flexible. You can write as many or as few as you find sustainable. And what you can do now might not be what you are able to do in six months. These goals may shift and change as your life goes through phases and seasons. Adjust it as need be. It also may take some time for you to find your stride. If you can only manage 100 words a day? 50 words a day? That’s fine. Forward momentum is what you’re looking for, not a specific number.
If the specific word count is too much for you, set a timer and work on your writing or something related (plotting, editing, etc.) for a certain amount of time per day. I’m a big fan of the Pomodoro Method, so you could easily do a single Pomodoro (25-ish minutes) and go from there. Heck, you can set it for 15 minutes if that works for you, though getting dragged out of flow at the 15-minute mark would drive me up a tree.
Create a writing ritual
No, this ritual doesn’t need to involve salt, the full moon, and swirling robes. Though I guess it could if you wanted it to. What I’m suggesting here is something like putting on a specific playlist of music, lighting a particular scented candle, having a particular drink or snack, or doing your writing at a specific time of day.
Brains love to create rituals and patterns. You probably put your shoes on in a particular order without thinking about it or have rituals around various elements of your life (checking for your wallet, keys, and phone before you leave the house, anyone?). This is doubly and triply true for neurodivergent brains, like mine. While ADHD hates predictability a lot of the time, it actually needs it to function, so it may feel like a push and pull for a while, but trust me. You’ll thank me later.
These rituals and routines, if performed regularly (it takes up to 2 weeks to create one) will help you get your brain to click over into creativity in a reliable manner. It won’t help you if you write yourself into a corner, but it will help your brain engage in that manner with more regularity. Whether you create this ritual for once a day or once a week, you can create space to do this thing in a way that makes sense to your schedule and life.
Don’t compare yourself to other people
Seriously, stop it. You don’t need to write as many words a day as I do or as Brandon Sanderson does (I hope he can feel me staring from here). You don’t need to be them. You need to be you. Comparison leads to imposter syndrome and straight into the feelings of inadequacy. You will end up miserable if you go down that route.
The reality is there is no one true way when it comes to creating healthy writing practices. There’s only what works for you. That’s it. Now, you can certainly try different methods that others have found success with, for sure. Experiment and find what you like and what works for your life and time. I’m all about learning from the people around me. However, if their method doesn’t work for my life? That’s not a failure on my part. It just means that our needs are different, or our lives are structured in different ways. No shame in that.
Think about what you can do regularly
The key to creating meaningful progress is cultivating a repeatable process. If you “win” NaNoWriMo but burn yourself out so hard that you can’t write for six months after that, have you really “won”? I’m not talking down about NaNo here, to be clear, but definitely think long and hard about what you can do for the other 11 months of the year. NaNo is a sprint, but a career is a marathon. That’s going to mean you’re going to have to create time for more than a month a year. Unless you plan on writing only once a year and cramming it all into that time period. If that’s what works for you, then go for it, but I doubt that’s going to be a sustainable or reliable method for most folks.
This dovetails with setting healthy goals for yourself quite nicely because you need to think about what’s going to work for you on a long-term basis rather than just what you can do in a short sprint. If an athlete breaks themselves every time they take the field in order to try and squeeze out that last bit of performance, their career won’t be very long. The goal here is longevity, not just going down in a blaze of glory once. We want to be comets, not meteors.
I hope these tips help you as we head into the final weeks of NaNo and as you contemplate your future writing plans. How are you going to make things healthier for yourself? How are you going to turn your writing into a career (if that’s your goal) rather than just write one thing and call it good there?
If you need help with these things, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’m available via email and on various social media outlets (you can find them here on the site). We’re all in this together, and I’m here to walk with you through it.
