Thread by @mattgemmell

I've never written 50k words in 30 days, for #NaNoWriMo or otherwise, but I've written two 95k+ novels. Does that qualify me to offer some opinions?

JUST KIDDING; I'm a man on the internet, so _of course_ I'm going to share my opinions, whether you want to hear them or not…

https://twitter.com/geekgirlweb/status/1058005761471721480

One common way to categorise writers is those who plan/outline first (planners), and those who just wing it (pantsers). I'm a planner, so really I'd say: hey, plan a lot before you start. But it's already 1st November, so I'm a bit late with that advice.

That said, I do highly recommend outlining. Broad strokes first, then iteratively refine until you're sick of doing so. I usually go down to the granularity of groups of a few scenes, and sometimes further. I also recommend reading about the three-act structure.

(I recommend KM Weiland's Structuring Your Novel. If you want a nice chart of her ideal structure, it's on her site — I made it!)

Now, stuff that trips me up while writing, or: lessons I learned the hard way.

Don't do research while writing. Note that I said "while"; I mean don't be writing, then stop to look something up, then continue. You'll wreck your momentum. If you do nothing else, invent a placeholder that means "FILL THIS IN LATER", and use it.

A good placeholder is something that'll never occur in the text. Nonsense is fine, like YYYYY or whatever, but ideally use metadata, like a comment in Word, Scrivener, or Ulysses. Bonus points if your app can give you a quick list of just those things later, and jump to them.

There's a specific kind-of exception to the no-researching rule, and it's this: use your sheets. You should have one Character Sheet per major character ("faces"), and one Location Sheet per major location ("places"). Might be a city or a single building.

If you haven't made them in advance, make them as you go. As you invent biographical info or personal characteristics (for people), or relevant ambient detail (places), update the sheets. You'll thank yourself a hundred times later when you refer back to them.

Try writing at the same time each day, in the same place. It can help. Also try stopping each day when you have a very strong sense of what comes next; jot down a couple of bullet points instead of the prose, and you've got an easy start the next day. It's half the battle.

Try to write something every day. A good way to break the fear is to say, OK, I'm going to write one paragraph right now, before breakfast. Do it, then get on with your morning. When you come back later, you've already written _something_.

If you're really having trouble, look at it a different way. What I do is, instead of thinking "What happens next?", I instead ask myself "What's the next thing I _need_ to happen?". Figure out the waypoints ahead, then see if the path between is clearer (virtually always).

Try not to edit while you're writing; again, "while". If you get a good routine going, some people (me!) find it helpful to re-read just yesterday's words each morning, and do a light edit. I then backfill any research stuff. Then, in the afternoon, I actually write.

But the general baseline advice is: write first, edit later. You can edit crap, but you can't edit nothing. If you're in real trouble, go ahead and skip forward to sketch out a scene you're dying to write. That's still progress.

Two final pieces of advice, most important of all.

1. Don't question whether you're a writer. There's no entrance exam, nor should there be. Writers write. There are far more people who think they're writers and aren't, because they're not in the chair and hitting the keys. I hereby bestow writerhood upon you. Now that's done.

2. Last, but by no means least, the most valuable piece of writing advice you'll ever see…

Backup your goddamned work regularly. Not on the same computer. Don't keep backups in the same physical location. If you lose it all, it's your own fault.

Thank you. Good luck! 👍