I know some writers hate NaNoWriMo and others love it. And agents are understandably wary of any NaNo novel that’s queried within 3 months of pencils down. For those who are unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month’, otherwise known as the pledge to write 50,000 words (or 200 pages of a novel) during the 30 days of November.
But me? I’m a fan.
I like setting goals where I can measure my incremental progress and watch myself get closer to my goal. When I was weight lifting, it was exciting watching my lifting weights go up every couple weeks. When I hit my body weight on my deadlift and squats… when I hit my ex’s body weight on my deadlift and squats… those were exciting numbers to see.
But that was a couple years ago. And a couple pounds ago.
These days, most of my incremental goals are with my writing.
NaNoWriMo is faster than my natural writing pace, and involves cutting a lot of things out of my life in November to make it happen. BUT! In the off season, there’s two sessions of ‘Camp NaNo’, one in April and one in June. Best of all? During Camp, you set your own goals.
This year, they’re working on improving the websites, but CampNaNo has expanded their tracker methods. For those of us who might be in an editing or revision phase? Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but I LOVE the new options.
Yes, these are listed on the Camp NaNo site, as options for tracking your current progress, but you can use them anytime, anywhere!
Writing Tracking Methods
- Words – the traditional NaNo yardstick.
- Lines – helpful for those writing poetry or other sorts of works.
- Minutes – Useful for those of us, squeezing in our writing (or editing) time when we can.
- Hours – Useful for those of us who are working on research or editing or workshopping or making index cards and plotting out. All those side tasks that don’t feel like ‘real writing’, but are, and are oh-so-necessary.
- Pages – ME! All the pages I’m revising get counted in here. I’m loving being able to track this coherently through their system!
Speaking of, it’s time for me to stop stalling and get back to those pages. They aren’t gonna revise themselves, now are they?
What’s your favorite tracking method? How does that change up depending on which writing phase you’re in?
WRITING TIPS & WRITERLY MUSINGS 