Writing a Novel in One Month

NaNoWriMo.org may not be the only option, but it’s a pretty damn good one

4 min readOct 31, 2021

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

There are plenty of options out there to help keep you motivated to write. There are fewer that help motivate you to write a whole book, but they’re out there as well.

But one resource that I have used every year since 2012 has been National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo.org).

The concept is pretty simple. Perhaps it’s one of those “why didn’t I think of that?!” kind of ideas, even. An online community of people who pledge to write 50,000 words toward a book during the month of November.

I first heard about NaNoWriMo from a friend of mine and we signed up on October 30th, 2012. Two days later, her and I and a third friend were off to the races!

We were very new to the website, of course, since it was our first time and we weren’t quite sure what it meant to “win” the competition. We weren’t sure if somebody was actually going to read our story and pick a winner out of multiple entries, we didn’t even have any idea how many people actually signed up for the site! All we knew is we were going to use it as a discipline to force us to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

If you haven’t already done the math, this equates to 1,667 words on average every day for 30 days. Some of you may remember

For most people on this website that may not sound like much, but for those who do not write regularly, it can certainly seem like a daunting task!

Well, even for writers it can certainly seem daunting to do it all in 30 days!

What Does NaNoWriMo Actually Require?

The first year I wrote for NaNoWriMo I took it literally. As in literally wrote a novel. I’m much more non-fiction inclined, let’s just say. My mind works a lot better with facts and citations and reality than it does making things up.

Truth is crazier than fiction, anyway. And that was true even before the insanity of 2020.

To “win” NaNoWriMo you really just need one thing: