How to Survive Your Fourth Week of NaNoWriMo

Research shows it takes twenty-one days to make a new activity a habit, so after three weeks of writing daily for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), you have established writing every day as a habit.

In addition, your word count should be around 35,000 words. You’re in the final stretch, and the 50,000-word finish line should be sight. You may be experiencing a second wind. You might find that meeting your daily word count has become more comfortable and takes less struggle to complete.

By this point in your story, you’ve most likely found the plot, and one of your characters has elbowed her way to the front to charge forward toward the end. Maybe you’ve begun to feel more like a real writer.

If you’re behind on your word count, persevere. You’re too close to the end to give up. You should still have one weekend left, and depending on when Thanksgiving fall, you have a few extra days to catch up on your word count. If not, take a mental health day from work and write.

Don’t worry if you hit 50,000 words before you’ve finished writing your novel. Keep going until you finish, even if it goes beyond thirty days.

When you hit 50,000 words and upload your novel to the NaNoWriMo website to verify you’re a winner, post your success to your social media channels and be sure to call your family and friends.

Now that you’ve written a novel, you might wonder what’s next. My advice is to keep going. Continue to write daily, although I recommend scaling back to a much more manageable three pages per day. They add up quickly and still allow writers to have a life.

Put your novel aside for a month, and then print it out and read it. You’ll be mortified with some of your prose; however, you’ll be amazed at other sections of your writing. Afterward, go back through and begin editing the hard copy and make changes to the electronic version.

I completed my first NaNoWriMo in 2004 after a friend had casually mentioned it to me. The experience taught me I could write something as long as a novel. I’ve written seventeen others since then.

So can you.