I just wrote my first novel in 21 days. At 55,000 words, that’s about 2,619 words a day. While I’m not ready to release it to everyone just yet, I’m going to share some tips on how you can become a novelist too, at lightning speed. (Update 12/7/2009: My novel, Mesothelioma Lawyers, New York, is now available online.)

I did this as my first foray into NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November. Now in its 11th year, NaNoWriMo has become a popular international event (despite the “Na” part of its name).

The goal is simple: write a 50,000 word novel from scratch in the month of November. 50,000 words because it’s a nice round number towards the lower end of the novel range. And November because the founders wanted to take advantage of the miserable weather.

You can start planning beforehand, but you can’t actually start writing until November 1st. Other than that, there aren’t really any hard rules, although they suggest that you don’t just write the same word 50,000 times. They say that if you think it’s a novel, they think it’s a novel.

This year, there are 170,000 participants, and about 15% of the participants will “win,” or reach the 50,000 word minimum by the end of the month. There are no points for character development or interesting plots; if you write 50,000 words, you win. The premise here is quantity over quality.

While that may sound crazy, the idea is that most aspiring novelists fail to write their novel, not because they’re not good enough, but because they just don’t get the words written. They have this saying: a bad draft can be revised into a great novel, but a blank page can’t be revised into anything other than a blank page. And surprisingly, some NaNoWriMo novels have become bestsellers.

I wasn’t sure if I could even finish, let alone do a decent job. But I love the finished product.

I haven’t officially “won” yet, because their site doesn’t let you verify your word count until November 25th. When you do, you get a printable certificate, an icon for your website, and inclusion in the winner’s list.

Will I do it again? Maybe not. I’m really glad I did it once, but I found it extremely stressful. But for those who want to, here are some tips.

1. Decide whether it’s worth it.

This is a big commitment that will take over your whole November. While you can back out at any time, it’s best to decide up front whether you really want to do it. If not, then don’t do it. If so, then don’t make excuses.

2. Turn off the TV, log out of Twitter.

There’s no time to lose, and you can’t afford distractions.

3. Join a support group.

NaNoWriMo offers a built-in community, with forums and ways to connect with local groups. I didn’t use these features, but they’re great for people who need to be in touch with other people who are going through it. I did enjoy the occasional pep talk emails though.

4. Know that you can do it.

I’ve heard people say that they can’t write a novel because they’re not a novelist. Well of course you’re not a novelist, if you haven’t written a novel yet! But after you write one, then you will be a novelist. So get started.

5. Do your planning and research ahead of time.

While I didn’t have much of an outline in my head before I started, I had some ideas. I also knew the main characters – their names, and a little bit about them. And the stuff I needed to research, I tried to do it before I started writing. Once the clock starts ticking, you want to just go full speed ahead.

6. Don’t worry too much about quality.

This was a tough one for me, because I tend to write very slowly, since I want to make sure everything works out just right. But I knew I didn’t have time for that here. I’ll need to go through my draft again to proofread it (I already noticed I accidentally brought a character back to life by using the wrong name). And I’m sure I introduced some inconsistencies by starting out one way, then changing my mind.

These things can all be taken care of later. That’s why they call it a rough draft. Rest assured that bookstores are filled with novels that are worse than yours will be.

7. Pace yourself.

50,000 words in 30 days is 1,667 words a day (that’s almost exactly the length of this blog post). But if you target the minimum, you have a problem when you fall short. I wrote 6,009 words the first day because I was excited to get started, but I knew that wasn’t sustainable. I decided to target 2,000 words a day, a goal I hit consistently, though I found it to be quite a lot.

By sticking to just over 2,000 words a day, I was on track to finish on time, without a big rush at the end. When I first saw that I could finish before Thanksgiving, and then saw that I could finish in three weeks, I ramped it up a bit. But only on three days did I write significantly more than 2,000 words.

8. Resist the urge to edit.

If you have a tiny little tweak to make, go ahead and do it now. But if it will take a while, just write a note to come back to it later. It will be hard enough just to write everything once, and there won’t be time to write everything twice.

9. Write the kind of novel you want to write.

Don’t think that your novel has to be the kind of thing high school kids would study in English class. Some parts of my novel are beyond ridiculous, but that’s the way I wanted to write. So you write the way you want to write.

10. Make decisions fast.

On the first page, I found myself in the midst of a huge internal debate over the brand of bourbon that the main character should be drinking. Realizing that there was absolutely no time for hesitation, I knew I had to just pick one and move on. This happened many times, so I got in the habit of deciding quickly, and reserving the right to change things later (the bourbon did change, in the end).

11. Be aware that some parts are much easier to write than others.

I found writing dialogue to be really cumbersome. I like writing what the characters say, but I hate figuring out how to say that they said it (i.e., “Blah blah blah,” he said in an accent reminiscent of the Swedish Chef on the Muppets, “blah blah blah blah blah.”)

But when I was writing exposition (the main character reflecting on the significance of various things), the words just flew by. So when I found myself writing fast, I kept following that train of thought as far as it would go. That would help pick up the slack when the words came like molasses flowing uphill.

12. Have a word count safety net.

I had one particular scene in mind that could be as long as I needed it to be, because two characters were just talking about stuff while waiting for something to happen. I was saving it for the end. I thought I’d write the rest of the book first, and after I was done, however short I was of 50,000 words, I’d get the rest from this scene. It could have been 20,000 words if it had to be. As it turned out, I didn’t need any extra words, but it was nice to know I had a safety net if I did.

13. Don’t necessarily do it in 21 days. Or even 30 days.

This kind of goes against the whole foundation of NaNoWriMo, but I think some people are better off not subjecting themselves to this time constraint. NaNoWriMo gives you 30 days to write 50,000 words, which is insane. I wrote 55,000 words in 21 days, which is even more insane.

Keep in mind that the time needed to write something increases more than proportionally with the word count. A 50,000 word novel takes much more than 50 times as long as a 1,000 word blog post. Writing a novel is a really big deal. If it’s going to drive you crazy to force yourself to do it in such a short period of time, then give yourself more time.

60 days would probably give you a comfortable yet fairly brisk pace for writing a 50,000 word novel. I wouldn’t stretch it out any longer than that though, or you might never finish. Get a decent draft done quickly, then revise it.

How many words in a novel?

By the way, for those of you wondering how long a novel has to be, The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award gives these definitions:

Novel: 40,000+ words
Novella: 17,500-39,999 words
Novelette: 7,500-17,499 words
Short story: less than 7,500 words

NaNoWriMo sets the minimum word count at 50,000, a nice round number that’s big enough to be considered a novel. And while that word count is on the low end of the novel spectrum, there have been some great novels around that length. Personally, I find most novels far too long. When I read The Lord of the Rings, I remember wondering “are these damn hobbits ever going to stop singing?”

For reference, here are some well known works (some of them shorter than novel length), sorted by word count.

Title	Word Count
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde	26,059
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland	27,241
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy	46,333
The Great Gatsby	50,061
Brave New World	64,575
Around the World in Eighty Days	64,594
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone	75,000
Frankenstein	75,142
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	78,260
The Sound and the Fury	96,709
Nineteen Eighty-Four	101,052
Gulliver’s Travels	102,211
Walden	107,406
Pride and Prejudice	122,685
Dracula	161,774
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	191,000
Crime and Punishment	208,114
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix	255,000

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