The (one) time editing isn’t important.

You may have looked at the title and wondered, “What does National Novel Writing Month have to do with editing?”

And the answer to that is everything and nothing.

And by that I mean this: If you have decided to use this month to write a novel —

You can’t worry about editing.

Not yet, anyway. The most important thing is just getting the words to the page by turning on your imagination and letting the words flow.

This can be really hard. Especially for people like me who edit as they write. I will blaze through a couple paragraphs, trail off, and then go back and reread everything and twitch and tamper with it. It’s not strictly a bad method, but when you’re writing 1600+ words a day (following NaNoWriMo’s standard schedule), you probably don’t have time to do that. And you’ll very likely end up actually hurting your progress because you can’t move on.

So don’t worry about it. Wait until everything is out of your brain. This is only a first draft after all! There’s plenty of time to rewrite, revise, and edit later.

Have December or January or even April be your personal “National Novel Editing Month.” It’s important!

But for right now, in this month, for that novel you’ve got in your brilliant mind — it’s time to write.

That’s what I’m doing, anyway! (Well, trying to. XD) I’m finding it hard, but I’m not giving up, and neither should you! We can do this!

And so here are a few gifs for motivation:

 

“Reams” by pawpaw67 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.