The smell of coffee permeates the air in my entire apartment. The sound of keyboard keys clacking, pens scratching, Lo-Fi blasting echoes from my office. It can mean only one thing: Camp NaNoWriMo is here.
Last week, I sent out a quick rundown of Camp NaNo to my newsletter subscribers (link at the bottom of this page 😉), and mentioned I’ll be doing an editing NaNo this April. The beauty of Camp NaNo is how flexible it is – you can set your own word count goals and work on whatever you like, be it a poetry collection, a series of short stories, or the outline of your next big project. But, even though editing is one of the drop-down menu options for Camp goals on the official NaNoWriMo site, the event really isn’t well structured for editing. The only thing you can track through the site is a daily word count, with a bar and line graph showing how on track you are to reach your goal. This works perfectly for creating, but I find my editing process is a lot more give and take, and simple daily word counts downplay the amount of work I get done.
So how to solve this problem?
After a long week of prep and debate, I think I’ve finally found a solution. Here’s how we can make this work.
Adapting Camp NaNoWriMo
Off the bat, I know I don’t want to use word counts to define my progress. But I do want a handy graph to show me where I am in comparison to my goal. The next natural conclusion is to measure by chapters edited. But not all chapters are created equal. Some are longer than others, some need just a few spelling corrections, and some need a complete overhaul. Throughout my editing journey, I’ve been giving myself little rewards for each chapter finished, and already I’ve learned that this method isn’t always enough to get through the slogiest days. When you spend three weeks on one chapter without hitting a single milestone reward, you lose sight of the massive progress you made in completely reworking a major chapter. You end up focusing instead on how long it’s been since you last earned a reward, and you feel like you’ve fallen behind.
That frustration is ultimately what inspired the method I will be using during Camp NaNo: sprint tracking. Tracking chapters doesn’t work because they’re too variable, but tracking the number of sprints I get done is consistent and better measures my actual goal of spending more time editing. The more time I invest in my novel, the more editing I’m getting done, whether that means rewriting an entire chapter for weeks or cutting out four chapters’ worth of typos in one afternoon. It’s all equally important to the final product, and all equally measured by a set sprint.
Sprint for the Gold
If you’ve been around the writing community for some time, I’m sure you’re no stranger to sprints. Public sprints are a popular way for groups of authors to motivate one another and work together. But everyone does them a little differently. How long you sprint, how often, and what metric you use to measure the success of the sprint will all depend on the individual writer.
Since I work on my novel daily, I’ll be using the Pomodoro Method to measure my sprints. I already use this task block based workstyle in my day to day, and it really helps my focus. Each Pomodoro is made up of two parts – a 25-minute work session, and a five minute break. After four Pomodoros – ie. every two hours – I take a longer break or shift my focus to a lighter work task so I don’t burn out. Since I leave my entire afternoons to writing, I have a hefty chunk of four hours to be divided into seven Pomodoros, with a half hour break in the middle.
Unfortunately, due to frustration and boredom with the extensive editing process, I haven’t been using these task blocks to their full potential. I want to get back on that during Camp NaNo. So instead of making it a goal to write 1666 words a day or to edit three chapters a week, my Camp NaNo goal is to complete 120 editing sprints. The mathematicians among you will be quick to tell us this is not a full month’s worth of sprints if I’m working with 7 sprints a day, but this is intentional. Here’s how I calculated it:
First, I decide how many days I’m willing to work in April. Since this is my full time career, I have the luxury of saying I won’t edit on weekends. There are five Saturdays and four Sundays in April, so cutting them takes me from thirty days to twenty one. But Easter is also in April, and I know I won’t want to edit while I’m visiting family. I cut the days I’ll be spending with them (ignoring the weekend I already cut) and am left with just 18 days to work with. Suddenly a month doesn’t seem so long a work period!
Now that I know the actual days I’ll be working, I multiply that by 7 for the daily sprints I want to do. 18 x 7 is 126, which I could take as my goal and be done. But that’s a tight schedule. It expects me to be working at 100% every single day I work. I know I’m not perfect, so I want to give myself leeway and set up for success. I could round down to 125, but even that is cutting it close. I’ll drop to 120 to be safe.
When scheduling out work like this, it’s better to err on the side of caution. If you underestimate how much you can get done, the worst case scenario is you overtake your goals and get more done. That’s a risk I’m willing to take!
Tracker Tracker
Now comes the fun part: making a tracker. I could of course use Camp NaNoWriMo’s word count tracker and just set my goal to 120 ‘words,’ but the false label will bug me, so I opt to make my own.
I’m a big fan of the bullet journal, using mine to plan out my workweeks, keep track of my sleep and household chores, family medications, workouts, and so on. While I was writing my novel, I even had a two page spread to track daily word counts. But this was a log, and what I want now is something visual to invoke the NaNoWriMo feel.
I can’t make a bar and line graph, because my bullet journal doesn’t have 120 dots in length or width, even in a two page spread. My next thought is to set it up like my weekly habit tracker, with a long two dot wide bar segmented into seven sections, one for each day in my habit tracker, and one for each sprint in my editing tracker. Eighteen bars only take up about a third of a page though, leaving my spread looking unbalanced and empty. So I swapped it, making each sprint a two by four box and filling an entire journal page with 126 boxes, just in case I do have a perfect NaNo. I’m going to date each of my eighteen rows and color in one box for every sprint I complete, so I’ll know at a glance how on track I am and if I need to make anything up. I’ll also alternate colors each day, so if I ever go over seven, I can fill in boxes from the row above or below and still see what day that work was done.
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