Writing.Com General Discussion

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month, to show yourself that you can do it - and to encourage people to explore writing. It isn't necessary to complete a novel in that time, so if your novel turns into a 120k word monster and takes six months, that's fine as long as you met the goal of 50k words in November.

The quality of the writing, story, or the story structure is not important, after all it is expected to be a first draft and that there would be rewrites and edits after NaNoWriMo. I suggest you discard all ambition with your story except (a) to have one and (b) to write 50k words. Everything else can be fixed later.

50k averages out to around 1700 words per day in November (specifically, 1666.66). Some days are going to be easy, others tough. The NaNoWriMo site has tools to tell you if you are keeping up, but the simple equation [word count] / [day of month] should give you a result of 1666 or higher if you are keeping up.

To anyone plunging into NaNoWriMo for the firs time, I only have one bit of advice: have fun!