You want to join a November writing challenge, but you’re in the middle of your revisions. Should you drop your project and do something new for Novel November? Maybe, if you want to. But there’s another option.
You can use Novel November to revise your novel instead. You just need to choose the right goal for where you are in the revision process.
Here are 8 goals you can set if you’re revising your book but still want to participate in a writing challenge:
Words rewritten
Words edited
Scenes revised
Words deleted
Worldbuilding & character development work
Pages/books read
A reverse outline sprint
A learning sprint
A promo/marketing sprint
For my explanation of all eight goals and when to consider them, listen to the full episode!
You can check out a list of NaNoWriMo alternatives with links to sign up here. Just FYI, I am not affiliated with or sponsoring any of these challenges and haven't even decided if I'm joining one this year.
Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
You can listen to this episode in your favorite podcast player here or watch on YouTube here.
Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
Transcript
Please note, this is a lightly edited transcript and may have errors.
Olivia (00:00)
Welcome to episode 46 of the Better Writer Podcast.
First off, just a little apology. If you are someone who listens solely on audio, you'll notice that last week's episode came out super late. Long story short, I had to practice going live on YouTube. I decided to do that with last week's podcast episode, not realizing that live stream videos take forever to process. and so it took so long for it to actually become a form that I could download. And by that point, the week had gotten away from me and I was, you know, pulled in a million different directions. So that finally came out. I'm so sorry for the delay, but it kind of works out because this week's topic is very closely related.
Last week I talked about writing challenges, specifically the many descendants or heirs of NaNoWriMo shall we say, and whether or not you should do a writing challenge, whether or not that is something that is actually going to be helpful for your writing process. And this week I'm talking about what to do if you are in the middle of a revision but still want to tap into that November novel writing energy.
So basically I think that sometimes we think of NaNo as all or nothing. You either have to be starting a brand new novel or you cannot participate. So if you're someone who is in the middle of a revision, you might be tempted to drop your current project and just start writing something new. Why not take a break for a month and participate? And that can work. If you are at a stage where you are feeling stuck, you're feeling burned out on your current project, if you are feeling like you just need to walk away for a little bit, great, do that. Experiment with something new, use NaNoWriMo as a break, have fun.
But if you are in a situation where you are building momentum or you have already hit your stride with revision and you don't want to pause this project, but you'd also like to challenge yourself in November, you're not out of luck. There are other alt NaNo goals that you can use. And I talked about this briefly in last week's episode when I said that I have always been a NaNo rebel, which means I never once in my life sat down on November first and started a brand new novel from scratch.
I did anything but that, and you can too. I'm sure that there is someone out there listening right now who is a NaNo purist who will say that I've never actually done nanorimo. And you're right, and I also don't care. I believe that the challenge and what you get from it far exceeds the value of following the rules of the challenge. So I am a happy nanorebel.
And I'm going to suggest some alt NaNo goals, alternative NaNoWriMo goals that you can use if you are currently revising your book.
So number one, if you are doing a complete overhaul of your story, you can count words rewritten. Are you technically following the rules of NaNoWriMo? No, but who cares? If you're rewriting every scene of your book, count words exactly the way that you would if you were drafting something new and see how much you can get through in the month of November. I will say depending on how extensive the rewrite, depending on how much thinking is going into your rewrite, you might be in a situation where you are going to want to go slower than trying to hit 50,000 words because you are going to want to be really critical and really think about whether or not you are creating something good or just pushing problems into the next draft. Don't do that.
You really do want to make decisions and be critical of this draft so that you can make it better. So that has been a word of caution there, but you can count rewritten words just like you would new words because there are no writing police. Who cares if you did not create it just for NaNoWriMo. That's okay.
The other thing you could do is count words edited if you are line editing. There are two ways that you could do that. You could copy paste those edited sections into new documents so you have a good count. You could just, if you already know the word count of each chapter, you can keep track of how many, you know, words you've edited that way. It doesn't matter. No one is keeping track besides you.
So if you are in line editing, just count the words that you have touched, even if touching them in air quotes just meant you read them, they were great, and you moved on. So it does not need to be strictly something that was changed. It could just be I line edited a scene that was 500 words and I'm giving myself credit for 500 words.
Number three, you could set a goal for revising a certain number of scenes. So if you are in a situation where counting words in any form is just not going to be helpful. Maybe you are making big developmental changes and some days you're cutting an entire scene, nothing is getting rewritten, and some days you might be adding a whole bunch of words, or if you're in a situation where you are just going to be evaluating your scenes or where half of your scenes need to be revised and the other half you're gonna just totally skip over, set a goal based on scene numbers. That can also be great if you are someone who tends to overprioritize just hitting the number versus making it good. If you are that kind of person and you're at the revision stage, we're not fast drafting anymore. We do want to try to make the book better, more readable. So I would recommend counting scenes. Set an ambitious scene counting goal, but you're not going to find yourself in a situation where it's 11:59 PM and you told yourself that you were going to edit 2000 words and now you're just like copy pasting stuff into your new doc so that you hit that. We don't want to be in that situation. Count scenes and don't be afraid to say I'm going to edit half a scene for this day. So your scene count goal does not need to be a whole number every day. It does not need to be 30, it could be 20, it could be whatever is realistic for you.
All right. Number four. And this is maybe, yeah, this one's a little bit, I don't know. You'll see how you feel about this one. You could set a negative word count goal. Now, I would only recommend this for someone who has to cut words from their book. Maybe you're trying to query and you are 20,000 words over the accepted count for your genre, you could set a new November goal of finding 20,000 words in your book to cut. And that is totally possible. I have done it. and that in and of itself is a challenge. So you could count how many words you have deleted from your draft over the next 30 days and just set yourself a goal of I'm just gonna find the things that don't actually need to be there. We do want to make sure we're not sacrificing story because if you have to obliterate the heart of your story in order to hit word count for a query, maybe that book should just not be traditionally published. Or you just take the risk of sending it to an agent at whatever your word count is. And if it is amazing and it deserves every single word in there, then it will either find its home as a published book or you will self-publish it and find your readers that way. So only do that if you know that your book is bloated and over a word count and you really want to reduce it for yourself. And you know that's gonna make it better.
All right, number five, you could set a goal around background work. This is something that I have done as a NaNo challenge in the past. I am someone who, you know, I wrote my disaster draft, and then there were a lot of decisions that I needed to make on the back end about world building and characterization and character backstories. So I did a sprint, a NaNoWriMo sprint, of making those decisions. And I think I ended up some writing something like 30,000 plus words of world building and character backstories and all this, you know, I was building a whole world for a series. and it worked, it was, it was great.
Because that especially is something that does not need to be written well, you can just binge the brainstorming. So if you are a person who does not want to write super fast, is not a pantser at heart, maybe you do something like world, you do a world building challenge, you do a character backstory challenge, you do a big outline challenge, whatever it is for you that you were gonna get something out of over that 30-day period. and you again, that could also be for revision. I did all my world building and character development in revision. You can feel however you want to feel about that, but it worked for me and it was a lot of fun.
All right, number six, you could also set a reading goal. So maybe there is something that you have been wanting to read about. Maybe you just don't have time to read in your genre and you know that you need to read more books that are currently selling so that you can familiarize yourself with the genre, what's selling, what is working.
So you set a reading sprint. You say, I'm gonna read 10 books in 30 days or you know, 300 pages, whatever it is, but set a goal that works for you. Have fun with it. All right. The other thing that you can do is set a do a reverse outline sprint. So I talk about reverse outlining all the time. That is when you when you create a summarized outline of your story to then use as a tool for developmental revisions. You're going to use that reverse outline to analyze the conflict the plot, et cetera.
I love reverse outlining because it gives you such clarity on what's happening in your story. However, the downfall that people often encounter with reverse outlines is that they are tedious to create because you have to go back and summarize every scene in your story. and if it's been a while, if you have a really long book, that can take a long time. So sometimes the best way to get through a reverse outline is to just try to get through it as quickly as possible so that you are not lingering there trying to make your reverse outline perfect because the reverse outline is a tool and nothing more.
So why don't you just try to get it done as fast as you can. I would say in an ideal world, it would take you less than 30 days. 30 days might be the perfect amount of time. 30 days might be too tight. It's okay. It's however you work. and also it just depends on, you know, again, how long it's been since you wrote your book, how long it is, et cetera, there are different factors in play.
But try a reverse online sprint, see how fast you can get it done, so that you can then move on to all the things that you are going to use your reverse online for.
All right, then number eight, which is a learning sprint. That could be very similar to the reading sprint above if you were reading nonfiction. But for me, a learning sprint would be more like I am going to deep dive on a certain topic and maybe I'm going to read books about it. Maybe there are magazine articles I've been meaning to get to.
Maybe my inbox is full of newsletters from writing coaches and things that I've not read and want to that I've been saving for the day when I would have time. You know, magically that's ever going to happen. or maybe there is a class that you have been meaning to finish or a, you know, a series of online classes that you've signed up for and meant to finish and never did. Do them in November. Set November as your learning month. And then instead of creating new content, you're consuming it, but for the specific purpose of then bringing that back into your writing either in the month of November or later on as you go back to your projects. You can decide if you're just gonna take a writing break and solely commit to that learning, or you're gonna go on and you know do them simultaneously. Either way works. Just, you know, choose something that's going to make you a better writer that you really need to go deep on and learn. and then have fun with it over the month of November.
All right, and then finally, number nine, which might be controversial, might make you cringe. But I think that it deserves a place on this list because it's relevant to your writing career in a broader sense. And number nine is to do a promotional or marketing sprint for your work. And I am categorizing this as a revision goal because you are revising with the intention that someday you are going to share your work with readers. And it is going to be easier to do that if you have already built a platform.
I know, platform, such a dirty word for us writers, but it's true that it is going to be easier. I'm not gonna say easy, I'm not gonna say that you can't sell a book without a platform, but it is going to be easier if you've already started doing the work before you have the pressure of actually wanting to sell the darn thing. So what if you did a 30-day promotional sprint with no actual string stakes attached? You're just starting to build the habit of talking about your writing, talking about what you're working on while you're still revising.
And I think revision is the perfect point in the process to start talking about your work in the broader marketing sphere because when you get to the end of the revision, you don't want to be starting at zero when you could already be pushing that boulder up the hill just a little bit. So that would be something to consider if you were looking for an alt-NaNo goal.
Again, for some people, that is going to totally be off the table and you might not even think of that as a revision related goal, but it could be something fun to try especially when there are going to be so many other people out there talking about their writing, talking about National Novel Writing Month. Over the whole month of November, people will be talking about their books, their projects, etc. So that might be a lower stakes way to get started on marketing if it's something that you have not touched at all in your entire writing or revision process.
So I will leave you with those nine suggestions. If one of those resonated with you, try it. What do you have to lose? Do something in November that feels a little bit out of your comfort zone that pushes you to commit to your writing, because ultimately I think that is what National Novel Writing Month has always been about. It has always been about setting a challenge that feels impossible and then pushing yourself to do something with your writing that you did not think you could do. And that doesn't have to be starting a novel on the first day of the month. It does not need to be anything besides you doing something that feels meaningful and challenging to you.
So I highly encourage you to pick one of those goals or something else that I haven't thought of. and if you think of another revision-related NaNo goal, I would love to hear about it. So please DM me. I'm @ Olivia Helps Writers on Instagram. And I would absolutely love to hear from you. And if this episode was helpful, please share it with a friend so that they can benefit as well. And maybe you can do an alt NaNo challenge together.
All right, have a wonderful week. Keep writing, keep getting better, one word at a time. See ya.
