Rocking NaNoWriMo as a Pantser

If you’re a pantser, you have a chance at winning NaNoWriMo.

Every year, at this time, we writers ask ourselves: Should I take part in NaNoWriMo?

This unique web-based event celebrates its twenty years this year and has become very familiar to a great majority of authors.

The goal of the event is to write a new draft of at least 50,000 words over the month of November. Over the years, NaNo has added many different possibilities to those who are called ‘rebels’ — writers who don’t follow the original rules — though the November edition keeps the goal of 50,000 words whatever you write.

In my multi-year experience with NaNo, I’ve been a rebel most of the time, since I’ve only written two new drafts. I’ve revised most of the time, which is what I’ll be doing this year too.

There are two main ways to dive into NaNoWriMo: as a pantser or as a planner.

Rocking NaNo as a Pantser

In many ways, approaching NaNoWriMo as a pantser is the most natural way, just like first approaching writing as a pantser is the most intuitive way. We get an idea, and we fly with it.

That’s how I wrote my stories for a very long time, and it always worked.

NaNoWriMo is perfect for pantsers: go with your intuition, let the story guide you, write everything that comes to mind, ’cause revision is for another day.

Go with your intuition

Intuition is one of the greatest tools for a writer, though it can be very tricky because intuition can’t be learned and can’t be fully explained.

All writers will have intuition. That’s essential to the evolution of the story.

Intuition works best when the story is moving, and so pantsers will find a real secret weapon here. Even if we don’t have a clear idea of where the story should go, every detail can sparkle new developments.

It has happened to me countless times: I start writing with the vaguest idea, and suddenly I write something that opens up new possibilities.

It could be a line of dialogue, a little action, a character’s reaction. Anything really. It is often unexpected, and still, the pantser’s mind will spot it, focus on it and run with the consequences.

Let the story guide you

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

— EL Doctorow

That’s the definition of a pantser if you ask me.

We start on a journey with the first step, and we don’t see the end of the road, but every step brings us a little closer, and so our sight becomes ever clearer.

All we have to do is keep going, and we’ll get to the end, sometimes in the most unexpected way.

Honestly, I think this is how NaNoWriMo came into being, and it is fantastic because it tells us: all you have to do is trust your story.

She knows where she wants to go, just follow her faithfully and you’ll get where you’re supposed to be.

Write everything that comes to mind

You know what NaNo says: in this challenge, quantity is better than quality.

There is a good amount of discussion about this, and honestly, to an extent, I don’t entirely agree that we should discard quality in favour of quantity.

Still, there is something to say in favour of going with our imagination, no matter what.

If we go with the story and trust it, we are bound to write a lot of rubbish. In the revision stage, we’ll have to rewrite a lot, but you know what? That’s how I found quite a few solutions to narrative problems.

NaNo has a hellish rhythm, it’s true. It doesn’t allow for a lot of pondering, so we are forced to write anything in order to keep going. Will it be rubbish? Most likely, but so what? We will revise it anyway.

Sometimes the anxiety to go on will produce ideas that are different and unusual for us, but strange solutions can turn into brilliant intuitions.

I write stories chronologically, so I never jump sections. When I need to go to the next plot-point, and I don’t have any idea how I’ll write whatever comes to mind. It always works.

Whether it is so unthinkable that it’s brilliant or so terrible that I want to unthink it, writing things down will move the story forward. It’ll give me something more tangible to work with when the time for revision comes.

These aren’t just pantser’s prerogatives. Planners will use a lot of these strategies too, but I think these are the best bets at NaNo any pantser has.

I should know — that’s how I won my first NaNo month.

And you should too. Do you have an idea floating in your head but you don’t know how to go about it? Enter NaNo, get it rolling, and never look back.

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Sarah Zama wrote her first story when she was nine. Fourteen years ago, when she started her job in a bookshop, she discovered books that address the structure of a story and she became addicted to them. Today, she’s a dieselpunk author who writes fantasy stories historically set in the 1920s. She’s studied the 1920s (first the Roaring 1920s in America, then Interwar-year Europe) for the past nine years and she’s now becoming fascinated with WWI. Her life-long interest in Tolkien has turned quite nerdy recently.

She writes about all her passions on her blog https://theoldshelter.com/