The Top 5 NaNoWriMo Tools

yWriter is a free word processing software program designed by multi-published multi winner Simon Hayes. As of 2009 it is in it's 5 edition yWriter5. I've been using yWriter since yWriter3.

What makes yWriter different from all other word processors is the fact that is was designed specifically for use with NaNoWriMo, allowing you to to separate your book not only by sections, paragraphs, scenes and chapters, but also by days. You can also store an unlimited amount of book projects in it, so that you can swiftly move back and forth between writing chapter 10 of book A and than chapter 4 of book B. (This by the way, is how I was able to simatainiously write five different books side by side during NaNoWriMo 2008)

The beauty of yWriter and the thing I like best about it, is that when setting up your new book project, you program how many days you have to get the project finished, and what your planned finish word count must be by the final day, and yWriter than tracks your progress as you write, keeping track of how many words you wrote each day, how many words you have left to write, how many days you have left to finish, how far ahead or behind you are on reaching your finishing word count, and how many words you have to write each day in order the reach your goal by the specified end time.

I have used yWriter for 2007 and 2008 NaNoWriMo's and was able to speed through the contest writing 183k words and 237k words, compared to the much lower word counts I had the years before doing NaNoWriMo without yWriter. I found that by using yWriter I was able to stop worrying about word counts and just write. I no longer had to worry about counting my words at the end of each day or writing up graphs and charts to track my progress, because yWriter did it all for me, allowing me the freedom to worry about what was really important: getting the words out of my head and onto paper. I don't think I could have reached 238k last, let alone do it writing 5 books simatainiously, if I had not been using yWriter4.

This year, for 2009, I'll be using the new yWriter5.

Never heard of Dr. Wicked? Until a few weeks ago, neither had I. I have never used it for a NaNoWriMo contest before and 2009 will by my first time using it as part of the National Novel Writing Month's 50,000 Words in 30 Day Writing Contest.

As the countdown to NaNoWriMo 2009 got underway, many of last year's NaNoer's made a return to the forums to sign up for yet another year of NaNo madness and with them they brought tales of success and tips and tricks on how they reached 50k in less than 30 days last year and what they'll do again this year and what they will avoid doing this year. Among their "trade secrets" many of the 2008 winners were commenting that they never would have made it if they had not used Dr. Wicked's Writing Lab. And these comments were soon followed with tales of woe as the harsh punishments of Dr. Wicked quickly taught them to write - write daily - and write as fast as hell or risk total annihilation of everything you had written already.

After tales of the horrors of watching your work erased as fast as you can write it - they than went on to tell, how now that they've used it and gotten used to it's evil plot to destroy everything you write - they would never again write without it, because it taught them a very valuable lesson: write now, edit later.

Intrigued by their cries of work lost forever, harsh lessons learned, and the hilarity of trying to write faster than Dr. Wicked could erase your work, I looked into this strange and sadistic writing software.

Apparently this is yet another software that was designed with NaNoWriMo in mind, for it's goal is to teach you to write every thing and anything off the top of your head, fast as lightening, without stopping to fix spelling errors and grammar mistakes. If you keep writing and keep moving forward Dr. Wicked does nothing and sits back quietly watching you write. But the second you stop writing, the second you go back and try to edit out mistake - Dr. Wicked gets to work. At first it sets off an alarm reminding you that you are supposed to be writing, that you have a deadline to meet and you can't waste time looking back at what you've already written. Ignore these annoying sound warnings, and Dr. Wicked lashes out an attack on everything you've already written sytimatically deleting your words so that you have no reason to go back to see what you already wrote, because everything you wrote has been deleted! The only way to stop Dr. Wicked from totally destroying all your hard work is to start typing faster than it can delete your words.

In the end, you become a very fast typer who can pound out 1,000 word in under 20 minutes, thus allowing you to be able to go far above and beyond your word count goal of 50k in 30 days.

I think, Dr. Wicked, used in combination with yWriter could easily help any writer overcome whatever fears they have about NaNoWrimo and would put even the most unwriterly person in the winner's circle. Than again - it could terrorize them so badly that they'd never dare write again for fear of evil doctors with big erasers.

Long before there was NaNoWriMo there was The Seventh Sanctum. This is one of the oldest websites out there, dating back to the days of old MAC sites built by computer geeks. It has grown over time to become one of the greatest fiction writer's resources to ever exist. In my early days of internet surfing, many, many years before Google was even heard of I stumbled across what was than a small site with I think, 3 character and story generators on it. It was one of the very first web sites I had every visited and I must have been one of it's very first visitors. In the dozen or so years since than, The Seventh Sanctum has gone on to be one of my most used writing helpers.

The Seventh Sanctum is an automated generator service. You click a button and it randomly spits out every possible character, setting, plot, weapon, etc, you could ever imagine. And it never repeats itself, so you have literally millions of story plots and characters at your fingertips, just waiting for you to write about them.

I have never done NaNoWriMo without The Seventh Sanctum. I couldn't even imagine doing NaNoWriMo without The Seventh Sanctum! Going one step farther: it was The Seventh Sanctum that introduced me to NaNoWriMo in the first place.

This is a relatively new site, a baby in the online world it was create mere weeks ago. With the way sites come and go, there's no telling how long it'll last, but I'm hoping that TweetGrid is one that is here to stay.

To use TweetGrid you first have to have a Twitter account. Than from TweetGrid you get to read 6 different news feeds simatainiously. You can change the feeds you want to read to be any topic. I recommend that you always keep the first one set to search "nanowrimo" and set the other five to match various topics you plan to write about in your novel.

By setting the first grid to "nanowrimo" you get to keep up to date on everything that's going on with other NaNoers and if you need help with your novel, you've got dozens of folks there at the instant you need them and can send a Tweet asking for help, right from the grid without having to go to the Twitter home page. You log into your Twitter account straight from the top of the TweetGrid page and once you are logged in you can send replies and retweets from there.

By setting the other five grids on TweetGrid to match various topics you are writing about, you will have a flurry of current events, and conversations going on live pumping your head full of countless plot twists and character conversations. This will speed up you writing tremendously by stopping writer's block right out of you life one and for all. You'll have thousands of plot ideas going past your screen every second.

Can NaNoWriMo exist without the all powerful dreaded Dare Thread? Most all 100,000+ NaNoer's will quickly say that NaNoWriMo without the Dare Thread just would not be NaNoWriMo at all.

No one seems to be really sure how it all got started, but many years ago in the wee early years of the National Novel Writing Month contest, they created a forum where members could talk about their novel writing adventures and mishaps. All that any one knows for certain is that one of the very first threads created on the forum was called "The DARES Thread". In it's introduction the Dare Thread stated simply, "Dare me to write about something weird. Leave a dare. Take a dare."

The first dare any one can remember was to have your main character use a spork in every scene, with the catch being that he could not use the spork for the same thing twice, and he must never use the spork as it was intended to be used - to eat with. Soon tales of main characters finding 101 uses for sporks became the yearly tradition of the Dare Thread.

Another early dare, stated that a pair of pants for no reason what so ever was to show up at least once in every chapter. Well as every NaNoer knows - this resulted not only in NaNo madness, but later spun off into a best selling book, followed by a best selling movie.

The whole concept is to play a game of Truth or Dare with the main characters of your novel, and tell fellow NaNoers which dares you are going to challange your characters with and help other writers come up with new dares to challange their characters with. The Dare Thread is by far the craziest and most trafficked section of the NaNoWriMo web site and over the years has evolved into become the very heart and soul of the contest. In ten years, no other thread has returned each year and no other thread has returned with such a driving force that it requires multiple parts each year.

The content of this lens was created by Wendy C. Allen compiled from posts on EK's Star Log, the official blog of author and artist Wendy C. Allen, a.k.a. EelKat. Reprinted here on Squidoo with permission.

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