November is National Novel Writing Month . . . but in my local writing group (Middle Tennessee Christian Writers), most of us have a hard time focusing on writing during that month, what with Thanksgiving and the lead-up to Christmas that naturally comes in November. So for the past few years, we’ve designated October as our MTCW Marathon Month. Since I know that many of you may be thinking about participating in NaNo—or you may just want to spend a few weeks trying to make some headway on your writing, I’ll share with you some tips and advice for marathon writing.

1. Prepare, Plan, and Organize
If the sign of a disorganized mind is a messy desk, what’s the sign of a disorganized writer?

Writer’s block!

In the past month, I’ve taught two workshops about this—planning, preparation, and organization ahead of time to help give us momentum when we actually sit down to write. So before your writing marathon starts, there are several things you can do to make sure you’re not going to get a few hundred words in and then get lost—or writer’s block.

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2. Set a Writing Schedule
I’m the world’s best at preaching this and the worst at practicing this . . . which is why I’m about 10,000 words behind where I should be this month on the first draft of Follow the Heart—because I haven’t set a schedule and made myself stick to it every day.

In one hour, if you’ve prepared, planned, and organized ahead of time, most writers can easily write between 500 to 1,000 words or more. No, not everyone can do this. Sometimes, no matter how well-prepared we are, the words just won’t come. But just like an old-fashioned water pump, the more often we work at it, the easier it will flow. So set a time every day—even if it’s just half an hour—to be your designated writing time. And commit yourself to doing nothing but writing during that time. No e-mails, no Facebook or Twitter, no blog reading/writing, no research. Just writing.

3. Turn Off the Internal Editor
I know, easier said than done. But even if it means you have to go back to writing long-hand, find a way to stop listening to the other voices in your head—the ones that say you can’t/shouldn’t/mustn’t and the ones that say always/never. The most important thing with a first draft is to get the story down on paper. Don’t worry about active vs. passive, showing vs. telling, sentence structure, or balance between character/setting or narrative/dialogue. FINISH YOUR FIRST DRAFT. Later, you can always go back and fix the craft stuff. Your first draft should be focused purely on storytelling.

4. Move Relentlessly Forward—No Going Back!
In addition to your story bible, keep a list—a file in Word or even handwritten in a notebook—of any changes that come up as you move further into your story. Things you know you’re going to need to change when you go back for revisions after you finish your first draft. When you’re writing your first draft, it’s okay to make massive changes to characters or setting or plot or conflicts halfway through. By then, you know each of those elements better and you know what’s going to work and what’s not. But if you stop and go back and try to “fix” what you’ve already written to reflect those changes, you’re going to lose all momentum of where that change can take you if you just stick with it and keep moving forward.

When I was writing the first draft of Stand-In Groom, after three complete rewrites of the first ten chapters (which meant that for a year, I basically made no progress on the story), I was forced to stop going back and to move relentlessly forward—by my graduate school deadlines. You see, I had a date by which I had to have a first draft finished and turned in. It was in the middle of my second semester—the semester by the end of which I had to have that first draft finished—that I came up with the hidden-identity plot. I was in chapter seventeen. I had ten chapters that had the story going one direction, followed by seven meandering chapters with little more than character development in them. But then, once I realized that the crux of the story rested on George pretending to be the groom and not being able to tell Anne, I flew through the remaining half of the book. In fact, I wrote the last approximately 20,000 words in one weekend to get it finished by deadline. (And those are still some of my favorite scenes in the book.) But if I hadn’t been forced to stop going back and trying to perfect the first ten chapters, I might never have discovered the true plot of the story.

5. Write Something . . . Anything
When you sit down for that scheduled writing time and you stare at that flashing cursor waiting for the words to come, and they don’t, DO NOT walk away from it and give yourself the excuse that you’ll just double-up on words tomorrow. Why do you think I’ve ended up writing the bulk of two of the last three novels I’ve finished in two weeks or less?

When I was writing what would become my first completed manuscript a little less than ten years ago, I got to a point at which (being a seat of the pants writer with no synopsis, only a vague story idea) I had no idea where my story was going. But I wanted to write. I needed to write. So since I’d just gone to the grocery store that evening after work, I wrote one of my characters doing the same thing. I had him get his basket. I had him pick out produce. I got him through the store all the way to the frozen-food section—where, surprisingly, he ran into another character; and, all of a sudden, I had a scene that moved the story forward again.

It sounds mundane and like bad writing (and it’s probably something you’d end up cutting most of in a revision), but not only are you working at that creative pump, you can also learn more about your character by doing something like that.

Who’s planning on participating in NaNo? Have you ever participated in a writing marathon/challenge like that before—in which you set a daily/weekly/monthly goal to meet in which all you’re focused on is word count? How do you prepare/plan/organize? How do you find time to do it? How do you make yourself build that word count every day?

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