NaNoWriMo Tracker Template and Some Resources

In anticipation of starting NaNoWriMo this coming Sunday, I’ve put together a tracking sheet to help me stay on track.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month and the goal is to write 50,000 words over the course of November. If you write those 50,000 words then you are considered a winner. My record is about 2000 words so thus far, I’ve been a loser.  Fingers crossed this year will be better!

There’s a line for each day in November. I’ve separated the Nanowrimo Tracker into two parts, Actual and Target, which should be pretty self explanatory.

I think it’s probably more realistic to aim to try to do a set amount of writing time each day rather than just aiming for a word count which could be kinda stressful. And really, the main thing I’m hoping to get out of this (other than a badly written first draft novella) is to create a habit of writing regularly.

I really like the time tracking boxes in David Seah’s Printable CEO series so I’ve used them in this template to track blocks of writing time. They can just represent the number of uninterrupted blocks of time spent writing but I think they work best when they represent a predetermined standard block of time. I like 25 mins but it could be 15 minutes or an hour. There’s space after in Time to record the exact time spent writing as well as a place to record the number of words written.

Here’s an example filled out where the blocks represent 30 minutes…

Under Target, there is the cumulative target number of words for the day. There’s also a space to put in the daily target for time spent writing. This can either be number of blocks (e.g. 2) or an amount of time (e.g. 1 hour).

There’s a space for notes like recording any obstacles that got in the way or whatever. Above the notes is a place to write the predetermined duration for each writing block.

Here are the download links:

• A4 Nanowrimo Tracker [PDF]
• Letter Nanowrimo Tracker [PDF]

(These links are externally hosted on Box.net so they may change so if you would like to link to the PDFS, please link to this page not the direct links.)

Here are some more resources that may or may not be helpful:

• Pamela Dowd has a whole heap of fiction writing aids including an extensive Character Development Worksheet
• A list of handy tools for nanowrimo including a bunch of various generators for names and plots
• A massive list of characterisation aids
• Fake Name Generator for character creation
• For fantasy writers, tables of prefixes and suffixes for Elven names
• Scrivener (Mac) have a special trial for Nanowrimo participants and 50% off for winners.  There’s also the free yWriter (Win), Q10 (Win) and Darkroom (Win) or paid Page Four and WriteRoom (Mac). For more, see 25+ Pieces of Writing Software You Should Know About
• If procrastination or lack of concentration is a problem, I recommend checking out the Pomodoro Technique (and one of its apps: Focus Booster cross platform, My Tomatoes online, Pomodoro Desktop for Mac)

Good luck to everyone attempting NaNoWriMo!!!

Tagged as: nanowrimo, templates, Writing