November, National Novel Writing Month, is now firmly behind us—and December is well under way. For those of you who participated in NaNoWriMo, the question remains: What next?
Of course, you don’t have to have participated in NaNoWriMo in order to be facing this question, and you don’t have to have participated in NaNoWriMo to benefit from the materials and resources that the NaNo community has put together for those working on complete or partially complete drafts.
So this week, I wanted to point you to some of those resources.
First of all, you definitely need to follow the official NaNoWriMo blog if you aren’t already. The blog runs year-round, and often tackles thorny issues like what to do when you’re stuck in drafting, or editing, or overcoming specific challenges to publication. The blog is easy to find at blog.nanowrimo.org. The post on December 2nd (“30 Covers 30 Days: Wrap-Up Post“) covers some of the highlights from the 2019 November writing crunch. Even more recent articles cover what to do when times get tough, and writing with chronic illness—all part of a 20th anniversary special series. Definitely worth a look. Their older articles are also invaluable, including Lana Alam’s 2017 piece, “6 Steps for Editing Your Novel.” And don’t forget all of those AMAZING NaNoWriMo “pep talks”! They finished out November strong with a pep talk from Anne Lamott, one of my all-time favorite writers and a rock in the sea of changing publishing noise. The Young Writers Project has a separate page of pep talks geared more toward young people too. (Anne Lamott appears on both.)
Writers Digest also hosts a number of useful blog posts and articles on what to do after NaNoWriMo. I recommend “9 Lessons Learned from a First Attempt at NaNoWriMo” by Jess Zafarras from December of last year, and “5 Habits to Help You Go from NaNoWriMo to Published Author” by Tina LeCount Myers from April of 2018.
I also wanted to point you toward a Bustle article from last week (“What’s The Next Step After NaNoWriMo? 7 Published Authors Give Their Best Advice”) in which Sona Charaipotra gleans some truly wonderful nuggets of wisdom from authors who have walked the path of drafting, editing, and publishing before. Many of them are self-published or taking a hybrid approach, so there are some gems of wisdom on self-publishing as well.
And of course, we hope you take a look back at our many posts about editing and finishing manuscript drafts here on SPA; in perusing our backlist, I’m continually impressed at how evergreen many of the articles here are. We’ve even written about publishing during the holidays, if you’ve already brought your draft to a polished stage of completion!
You are not alone. ♣︎
Do you have ideas to share? Please don’t hesitate to drop us a line in the comments section, and I’ll make sure to feature your thoughts and respond to them in my next post!
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