This is one part procrastination and one part how not to be a dick to your friends and loved ones in November. I say this with love but, honestly, we as writers cannot completely shut out the real world. It is very tempting to do so and I get why some go off and shut themselves off in their rooms but it's not practical. It's mostly not practical because I believe a lot of us have day jobs. Even if you don't have day jobs, you have responsibilities and so on that need to get done during the day. Therefore, we're going to try and balance out real life and NaNoWriMo.
Pretend it's day one of NaNoWriMo (1 week and a day people!). You decided to start right at midnight and stayed up until 3 am writing. However, you also need to get to work at 9 am or earlier. What you should do instead is only stay up until either you have half of the day word's count (834 words) or until 1 am instead of 3 am. Now, you can do the other half on your lunch break. Or when you get home or on your commute home if you don't drive. What I am saying is not to be a hero and sacrifice the fact that you will fall asleep at your desk if you stay up until 3 am being a writing machine. Go for half of what you really want to write or cap your nighttime writing.
Another idea to try that I've touched on before is figure out what time of day is best for you to write. It might be just after dinner, before anybody else is up, or after everyone has gone to bed. You don't need to go and be a hermit. You can wait until everyone else in your family is off doing other things and write. If you have housework that you need to do during that time, then do 20 minutes on, 30 minutes off. In 20 minutes, write as much as you can and then do 30 minutes of whatever housework needs to be done. Or flip it and write for a half hour and do 20 minutes of housework. Continue to do this until you reach your goal for the day.
Now, the one big problem of November (if you're in the US) is Thanksgiving. There's two ways to deal with this. Inflate your daily word count so it doesn't matter that you have to take anywhere from 1 to 3 days off before Thanksgiving or do it at the end of the month. I highly recommend doing it before Thanksgiving as you're going to be riding high on the feeling good part of writing. You're not going to be at the hard parts of your plot or writing (the dreaded middle) and you'll be able to get more words out of your fingers. Another idea is to give up the nap that you're going to want to take after eating turkey. Power through it, possibly with coffee, and use that time of everyone else sleeping to write.
Those are the three big ways to help you continue to write as real life creeps into your writing time and your writing time creeps into real life. Unless you are cool enough that you can basically go on a retreat for 30 days, you're going to have to learn to balance the two. If you've done this before, what are your best coping methods? What hasn't worked at all? Feel free to leave it down in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter. Until next time, keep on writing and plotting!
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