So, I’m finished. It was fun.

“But wait,” you might say. “Jared, you are no Nathan Lowell! How did you finish NaNoWriMo in less than half the time? What mighty trick do you have up your sleeve?” No tricks. Well, okay, two tricks.

First, I had a detailed outline – While this was a re-write, the point of the rewrite was replacing huge chunks I ripped out during the previous editing process. All of the new content was broken into chapters, and each chapter was broken down further four parts:

- Introduction of new conflict
- Protagonists deal with new concflict
-Twist
-Resolution

Now, this is pot-boiler plotting in the extreme, but when you’re trying to throw down words as fast as possible, this sort of plotting works. 50,000 words is intimating, but a 1800 word chapter a day is more manageable. Break down those into 450 word chunks that you’ve mapped out, and that’s easy-peasy.  You can always slow down the plot in the editing stage.

Secondly, I used Write Or Die.  Seriously, you guys, Write Or Die is best thing for rough-draft writing since the pencil. Using the web app, I was able to churn out 400 in fifteen minutes spurts (Write Or Die seems to work best with short time limits and word counts. For me, anyway. Your mileage may vary). Which means it only took little over an hour to do a day’s NaNoWriMo writing. If you can spend two hours a day a writing, well, you too could probably finish NaNoWriMo in two weeks.

I was also extraordinarily single-minded. I really wanted to finish this in two weeks, so I could turn my attention to Book 2 of Fables of the Flying City. And that goal was a powerful motivator. If you really want to work on something else, using that has a carrot to get you finish what you’ve started is pretty effective.

At least, it was for me.

“We can’t be ready for everything,” Darshen said. “That’s impossible.”

“We are Dodos,” I said, proudly. “The impossible is our stock in trade.”

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