Advice for WriMos as you enter the home stretch

For those of you doing NaNoWriMo, the best NaNo advice I can give you at this point in the game is to throw caution to the wind and work to the end of the story. If a scene is too difficult, write a placemarker sentence or paragraph of what should happen in it and move on to the next scene. Write whatever you can write, and as as much as you can write. If you have later scenes already in your mind, write them out of order then work toward them. Focus on the getting to the end of the story, even if it means you have to fill in some stuff later. I’ve found that it’s easier to rewrite a complete draft even if I have to fill in some missing scenes, than to pick up a cold unfinished draft and finish it after having lost the momentum (AND then still have the whole rewrite to do). This may be different for you, but especially if you’re the kind of writer that has trouble finishing things, you need to work toward finishing the story by the end of the month. Remember: this is just the rough draft of a very short novel. It doesn’t have to be good; you just need to get all the essential bits written down. Every first draft needs a rewrite, but you can’t do that until the draft is done. NaNoWriMo is all about knocking out that first draft. You can agonize over it sentence by sentence in the rewrite. 😆 Good luck, everyone!