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NaNoWriMo: What Writing A Novel Teaches You 
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One month ago, I set out to write a novel. 30 days later, the novel is finished (at least in the sense of being a complete first draft). Here’s what I learned from the process, most of which has nothing to do with writing fiction.
Despite having to write the whole thing in 30 days, I’ve had the luxury of actually doing some editing on my NaNoWriMo novel. One of the key tactics? Using find and replace to eliminate the phrases I use too often. Here’s a few everybody should keep an eye out for.
The November 30 deadline for the NaNoWriMo project is fast approaching. That means that I’m spending a little less time in front of a freshly-tweaked word processor, and a little more time in front of a spreadsheet. Why?
The NaNoWriMo novel writing project hasn’t imposed too many restrictions on me (other than having to find two hours a day to work on it). But there is one weird constraint: I can’t read any other fiction while I’m working on it.
Despite its appealing simplicity, I gave up on using FocusWriter early on in my NaNoWriMo project because I didn’t like the way it rendered on screen. As reader Dave quicly pointed out, you can make the software more to your taste with a little tweaking. Here’s how to do it.
The NaNoWriMo writing project is going very nicely: after 18 days, I’ve written 46,102 words, so getting to the basic target of a complete novel of at least 50,000 words seems very achievable. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get occasional pangs about the approach I’ve taken.
My rail trip from Melbourne to Adelaide yesterday wasn’t just an excuse for even more 3G broadband testing. I’d deliberately scheduled it so I could spend a day largely doing editing work on my NaNoWriMo novel, and I’m really glad I did.
A standard piece of advice for writers is: write what you know. When you’ve only got a month to write a novel, that truism has a corollary: use everything that happens to you.
