National Write Like a Crazy Person Month: Tools and Tips

NaNoWriMo is right around the corner and, if you are like many participants, you're eagerly counting down the days. Maybe you've started plotting. Maybe you're going to wing it this year. You might be going for the full 50k... or you may be doing NaNo light this year. Wherever you currently stand in NaNo prep; you do know that on November 30th, you want to be at the finish line with thousands of others.

And that's a good thing! NaNo is all about that finish line. It doesn't matter how you get there, just that you get there. It doesn't matter if you have an award winning novel when you're finished or if you have to put those 50,000 words in a deep dark box and shove it under the bed until the pages eventually disintegrate.

NaNo is all about letting go of those perfectionist tendencies and just writing. You'll never know what you can accomplish if you never give yourself the chance to try. In a few short days... your month long chance begins!

And the good news is that you don't have to go it alone. There are thousands upon thousands of tools out there to help you as you race to the finish line. And that's what this is all about. Helping you locate those tools that will make your life a little easier this NaNo season!

If you're like me, your inner editor is a madwoman intent on driving you equally as mad. Those little red and green lines in Word are traps of the worst variety. The kind that taunt your inner editor into a frenzy and make hitting that word count virtually impossible.

Meet PageFour. It might just be your best friend. Unlike Word, PageFour doesn't much care whether your spelling and grammar are correct. It's not going to yell at you if you're wrong. In fact, it's not even going to tell that you're a comma crazy psycho. It's going to ignore all of that... and allow you to do the same.

It's also, unlike Word, going to allow you to create individual folders and pages right in the program. Need to know what you named the dog in Chapter Two? Open the Chapter Two folder and viola! You aren't going to have to scan through page after page to find what you want. You can go right to it... and then right back to what you were working on without endless scrolling.

I've been using PageFour for years and I cannot say enough good about it. I adore it. I use it religiously. Every novel, short story, idea, plot, character chart and piece of research I've done is in PageFour. It archives automatically. You can export and back up easily. You can find what you easily. It's divine. You can try a trial version of PageFour at: http://www.softwareforwriting.com/pagefour.html

Not what you're looking for? YWriter might be more up your alley. It allows you to write scene by scene and chapter by chapter. And unfortunately... that's about all I can tell you about YWriter. I've tried it and it's just too much for me. Too many frames. Too much going on. But, there are hundreds out there that swear by the software. You might too. You can download YWriter5, for free, at: http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html

Use a Mac? Storyist might be for you. While I have never used it, I've heard great things from others about the software. They rave about the features and how easy the program makes it to keep track of every aspect from setting to characters to the story itself.

And to put it further into the plus column, Storyist is sponsoring the NaNoWriMo Night of Writing Dangerously Fundraiser this year and will be giving away two Kindles and two 50.00 gift cards to the top fundraisers at the event. Additionally, Storyist is offering all NaNoWriMo Mac participants the chance to try Storyist during the month of November for free; and is also offering a 25% discount on purchases of the software for NaNoWriMo participants as well. You can check it out at: http://storyist.com/index.html

Need a little feedback on your novel as you write? Check out ReviewFuse. It's an online critique group. You submit your work and are assigned critiquers based upon your critiques of others. If you suck at critiquing... those who review your work will suck as well. If you're awesome; your reviewers will be too. You can make your work private so that only those assigned reviewers can view it or public so that anyone in the community can read and review. One thing to remember here is that you must complete reviews of others in order to get reviews. I can't remember the specific line up, but I believe you have to complete 4 reviews to get 3 reviews of your work. If you pay for an account, the number of reviews you have to do is reduced. You can also join and create focused groups, and decide who you want to review your work with a paid account.

Something to note here is that, for those first starting out, you may get stuck reviewing genres you don't particularly like. You can simply wait for a review to expire if you don't really want to review it, but it takes 24 hours for that to happen. As the system learns more about you; the less you'll be asked to review genres you hate. For an automated system, it does really well adapting to what you like and don't like the more you use it. It just takes some time!

Need something to help keep you on task? Try Dr. Wicked Write or Die. Tell it how many words you want to write and a time frame and then decide whether you want the program to give you gentle nudges when you fall off track or if you want it to beat you over the head and ta-da! Horrid sounds will play until you start writing; your story will start unwriting itself and all sorts of unpleasantness will ensue if you don't write. How evil the program is depends on you. It is, essentially, your own hell spawned automated motivation machine.

If this doesn't do it for you and you need more resources; check out Charlotte Dillion's pages. Many are geared for the romance writer but there are a lot of really great resources (including character building tools, resources on writing, writing prompts, Q&As, and various others) posted to her list that can be a huge help for the NaNo'er from every genre.

Happy Writing!
Fallon