10 Days to NaNoWriMo Success with Evernote

I'm a little competitive. How about you?

I don't just want to "participate" in NaNoWriMo. I want to WIN!

And more than anything, I want to end November with a finished first draft of my novel in hand. I'll need to write pretty quickly to pull together at least 50,000 words by midnight on the 30th of November. But I'm up for the challenge!

Writers are independent souls and with highly individualized approaches to their creative projects. However, they tend to falling into one of three broad categories. Pantsters as the name implies "write by the seat of their pants" without planning out much before beginning writing. I started as a Pantster, but writing for film and TV--forms which demand a strong story structure--forced me to learn to plot and plan in advance. Now I'm a dedicated Plotter, who likes to have character, story and structure planned as much as possible before even beginning a project. Advanced planning keeps me from wasting time on premises which have no promise and stories that fizzle out somewhere in the middle. In between the two is the Planter, someone who lightly plans in order to leave the door open to inspiration.

As a dedicated Plotter (sounds kind of sinister...), I pick up Megg Geri's sweet little guide

Write a Novel in 30 Days: The Interactive Writers Guide for Finishing Your Novel in 30 Days (long title, but a short and easy read). Megg suggests using Evernote to organize all your musings and research. In just a few days of using Evernote, I've realized that I can use this program not only to organize my research, but to plot my entire novel.

Evernote is more than a note taking program: it's an easy to use database with some amazing tools built in. The base unit in Evernote is unsurprisingly a Note which can contain almost anything: photos you take or upload, checklists, tables, etc. I'm particularly taken with Evernote's ability to capture website information as a link, simple page or complete pages which you can edit and annotate in the program. Fantastic. You can organize these notes into Notebooks and then combine Notebooks into nameable Stacks of notebooks to organize all your novel research in one place.

But wait, there's more! Evernote comes with a few novel structuring templates built in--and I found more. Many more! So, in this series of blog posts, I'm going to help you (assuming you are a Plotter or at least a Planter) brainstorm and plan out your novel in 10 days using Evernote. The program can be downloaded for free on just about any platform and accessed online, too. There are premium membership levels that you can get with more functionality for a monthly subscription fee. I upgraded because I have more devices (smart phone, two iPads, two computers...) that any other person on the planet and I wanted to run Evernote on them all. But for purposes of this adventure, the free version is just fine. If you have one or more writing partners, you may wish to pop for a premium or business plan. The business plan has a nifty bulletin board and some other nice features for writing teams.

Are you game to plan your novel with Evernote? If so, here's you task for today:

Download Evernote on at least one device (computer may be easiest).

Bonus One: download it to your smartphone or tablet, too, so you have always at hand.

Resources:

Write a Novel in 30 Days? Sure...

Absolutely the best part of deciding I'm going to write a novel is reconnecting with writer friends whom I've fallen out-of-touch with in the last few years. My great good buddy and grad school roomie Amy Miller is an inspiration. Now a budding picture book author, Amy and I met in the Spalding University MFA program during an international residency in Rome and Tuscany (absolutely magical and the subject of a future blog post). Our friendship was cemented during my visit to Louisville where Amy plies her craft, and travel to Ireland and Prague (sigh). Now the Executive Director of Louisville Literary Arts, we connected via Zoom recently and I mentioned that I'm in the preplanning stages of writing a novel.

Me: I keep seeing classes for writing your novel in 100 days so it must be possible to write one pretty fast...

Amy: We're holding a class on how to write a novel in 30 days.

Me: Thirty days! That seems impossible.

Amy: ...Well, you know that's what NaNoWriMo is all about...

Somehow I'd missed the bit about writing THE ENTIRE novel in 30 days the first time around.

So this year I'm getting professional help.

Jennifer Hester Mattox, a nine time winner of NaNoWriMo, is teaching an online class for Louisville Literary Arts in partnership with the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I've signed up. It's October 8 at 7:00 pm ET. I have one buddy for #NaNoWriMo2020 and I'm thinking about putting together a team (gasp!). I hope my buddies will take the class with me so we're all as prepared as we can be for the November writing marathon. Here's a link in case this sounds as good to you as it does to me! https://www.louisvilleliteraryarts.org/webinar-descriptions

NaNoWriMo - Here's We Go Again!

The last time I tried to write a book during National Novel Writing Month was a complete rout.

It was 2015 and I'd just completed an MFA in screenwriting from Spalding University. I'd always loved fiction and thought that writing a novel might knock me out of a post-graduation writing slump which I'd been told was normal but dangerous if it went on too long. I signed up for NaNoWriMo on November 1, 2015 sure that I'd win the 50,000 word challenge.

I think I lasted two days and about 2,500 words before the job, the kids, the fact that I didn't know a single thing about how to structure and write a novel got the better of me. When I logged in to the NaNoWriMo site to sign up for this year, I didn't even recognize the name of the novel I said I was writing. It's a complete blank.

So this year, I'm taking a totally different approach. I'm PREPARING. Chapter outline. Character descriptions. New software programs. The works. I'll share everything I learn here, so stay tuned.

BTW, my good friend Amy Miller, the Executive Director of Louisville Literary Arts, mentioned a virtual class that they're holding called Write Your Novel in 30 Days on October 8th. Here's an link. Hope to see you there! https://www.louisvilleliteraryarts.org/webinar-descriptions