These days the forums and message boards all over NaNoWriMo world are buzzing with posts about strategies for getting your daily word count and how to add to the word count and how to make it to fifty thousand words.
My strategy? It changes from year to year. As far as word count goes, I know that to get to fifty thousand by November 30, one must write a minimum of 1,667 words each day. However, I also know that there will be days that I just cannot write do to illness, travel, or other obligations. So how do I deal with this? I plan on writing a minimum of three thousand words a day. I also plan on at least one day a week of a long block of writing which should yield about five thousand words. That said and done, and adding in “lost time”, I try to plan to reach fifty thousand around November 25th. If on that day I am still behind, then I sit and write for as long as I can each day til I reach the word count and if that means no sleep, so be it. Sleep can come on December 1st.
Oh! And don’t forget to allow a cushion on the word count. Plan on getting to 50,500, at least. Then when you enter it into the word count validator, you won’t be surprised if you come up short. I’ve seen my word processing program have one word count and theirs have a different word count by maybe as much as fifty or sixty words but I plan for this by getting in “extra” words.
More next time.
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