Link of the Week: "How to Survive NaNoWriMo: Planning"

This week's Link is to a blog post about planning for NaNoWriMo. On the one hand, it does seem kind of early to be talking about November's event. On the other hand, this is about the time last year when I came up with the idea for the novel that I ended up writing a first draft of during November 2011. I think that the pre-planning I did for my writing was key to successfully writing nearly 60,000 words in those 30 days.

The post is:  How to Survive NaNoWriMo: Planning by Jason LaPier and while I'd done a decent job of planning the plot for my story before I started writing last fall, I wish I had seen this and the other things he had suggested planning out, especially in terms of character details, since I was rather vague on all of those beyond the things that were on the surface due to the plot I had constructed.

In Write Every Day, I talk about the pros and cons of using NaNoWriMo as a way of jumping into developing a Daily Writing Chain. In brief, there's a lot of great community support for the activity, but if you focus too much on "winning" NaNoWriMo while trying to also develop a daily writing routine, you might feel some stress. If you do decide to tackle NaNoWriMo, posts like Jason's will likely be a big help to you.