Rules for NaNo Novel Writing

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."

- Red Smith, Philadelphia and New York sportswriter

Well, that's one way of looking at writing. I think I first heard that on the old TV show Thirtysomething. We're here to look at the peculiar demands of NaNoWriMo, though. 50,000 words in one month! These rules have served me well, and ignoring them has cost me forward momentum.

• Write every day. Seriously. Taking a day off can and has led to two, three days, a whole week, and a word count hole that's impossible to fill. Even one sentence on an off day can help maintain momentum. Writing in the same time and place most days helps build up a good writing habit.
  
• Just write. Let the words flow. Indeed, seek out the state of "flow," where the writer is just taking dictation from his characters. It's an amazing feeling. Even short of that, turning off all internal writing filters yields higher word count and occasionally some surprisingly good prose.
• If it's scrolled off the screen, fix it in December. Sure, fixing that typo in the previous sentence is fine. Going back to fix some writing flaw, rethinking a scene that's already written, even changing a character's name with find-and-replace, all destroy forward motion and waste time.
• A little planning beats no planning at all. Chris Baty's book is No Plot, No Problem, but there's a difference between not plotting out the whole novel, and having no organization. A 100-word blurb, a list of planned chapters, a couple of paragraphs describing each major character. All these help keep the writing going, rather than stopping often to figure out the next plot turn or whether George and Lula need to drive north or south to reach the haunted cabin. At the end of a writing session, a few words about what to write next can help getting started quickly at the beginning of the next.
• Never write a sex scene on deadline. This requires a delicate touch. The writing can get too mechanical or too elliptical. In real life, sex is all sensation and no thinking. On the printed page, the author must evoke those sensations in the reader's mind while his intellect is fully engaged in the story. Writing about sex at breakneck speed just washes away all imagination in a torrent of words.

There's more I could add, but, gee, in previous years there were only three rules. So let's not get too complicated.