NaNoWriMo Winners who Became Successful Pt. 2

Advice from Stephanie Perkins:

• Start your project without a lot of preconceived ideas and notions.
• Start your project without a lot of preconceived ideas and notions.
•  Remember: Your novel is supposed to suck right now. The only way you can mess this up? That’s if you stop writing. So keep going! Keep sucking! You’re doing great. I’m proud of you.

Advice from Lydia Netzer:

•  Silence your inner editor. Don’t worry; just write. Go, go, go.
• A lot of people frown on NaNoWriMo, believing it produces reams of garbage, and that writing quickly can only lead to writing poorly. We’ve all run into this attitude. Maybe we’ve had someone say “Why would you waste your time writing something you know will be bad?” I respectfully disagree with these people, as I have found that during this mad dash, I find different layers of my projects that I would not have been pushed to uncover at a steady, reasonable pace.

Advice from Rainbow Powell:

• That’s not writing, I thought, that’s just piling up words. But then I thought about how wonderful it would be to have a pile of 50,000 words…
• I set three goals:

1. To write every day.
2. To write at least 2,000 words every day.
3. And—this was crucial for me—to keep moving forward.

For more advice from National Novel Writing Month winners, check out NaNoWriMo's Pep Talk Page.