Ten Tips for #NaNoWriMo

1 – Write like your ass is on fire and you are farting gasoline.

2 – Put the pedal to the metal and go. Writing a novel is nothing more than a road trip between “once upon a time” and “happy ever after”. The sooner you get there the sooner you are done.

3 – Don’t take any detours. Drive straight through just as fast as you can.

4 – Pour out your words with the pure and unbridled and whole-bellied honest velocity of a frat house kegger power-hurl. Vomit out that first draft. Blow great funky-chunks of prose all over the place. You can clean up your mess in December.

5 – Lay down words like you were a thunderstruck bricklayer building a life-size recreation of the Great Wall of China out of Lego building blocks and you possessed the keys to the Lego factory.

6 – Line up all of your apostrophes against a wall – (not the Great Wall – you are building that, remember?) – and shoot them full of bullet holes. Remember – “you’re” only counts as ONE word while “you are” counts as two.

7 – It helps to have a road map. Nail a big old sheet of poster board to the wall of your writing cave and scribble notes to every plot point you think of. Don’t trust your memory. Memory is a lying cad with unspoken dreams of political achievement – whose mouth runs in both directions at once.

8 – Don’t think too much. Just focus on remembering those two magic words “AND THEN”.

9 – Don’t let your face be seen on Facebook for the entire month of November. Leave the twittering to the birds. Unlink your LinkedIn and completely lose all Pinterest in posting pretty pictures. Time wasted is words poured needlessly down the drain-hole.

10 – Don’t ask me why I am writing this blog. I really ought to be writing right now.

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yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon