Listen to Ed

One great thing I started doing was following Ed McBain’s advice:

No outline at first, except the loose one in your head, draped casually around the idea.

Once you've found the voice, write your first chapter or your first scene.

This is how Fire Season started: a couple of pages I wrote long ago, without thinking too much about it. Some scenes which kept bouncing around in my head. Nothing was very developed. More of a mood, a tone, the voice of Nino sounding in my head, very similar yet well differentiated from my own.

Outline the novel in your own way [...] The outline is you, talking to yourself on paper

This was the hardest part, the one that took the longest during the first NaNo days. Pieces of the story would emerge, like various colored vegetables in a minestrone, and I would arrange them in some tentative order. I found out along the way that outlines work only in 3rd person, while the novel is in 1st person. Ed is right: I'm talking to myself when outlining. I'm acting as Nino when writing.

Set yourself a definite goal each day. Tack it on the wall

This is easy. And NaNoWriMo works very well to institutionalize that process.

I found that avoiding skipping a day is very important too. But not always feasible. The best advice I actually don’t remember where it comes from. Some interview with some writer. But I found it to work very well: every day I review what I wrote the day before, and quickly edit it. I usually don’t make major changes, but this allows me to end up with cleaner text and to “get back” into that parallel universe. A universe of dangerous adventures but, somehow, greater serenity of the real one.