And no this is not about relationship type cheating.

For those of us involved in this crazy month of fifty-thousand-words-in-one-novel-in-one-month mania that is NaNoWriMo, we are now at the two-thirds point.

Twenty days into the thirty-day process.

And maybe one or two of us are starting to get just a tiny bit nervous.

After all, this thing is hard to do even for the most verbose of us, as was mentioned here a few days ago.

So we may find ourselves in the unenviable position of not really having enough words in our novel coffers to give us a fighting chance to “win” at the end of the month.

Ignore the fact that there will be no person actually reading this stuff at the end of the month. And ignore the fact that many writers disguise their work before submitting it for validation by substituting letters and scrambling the draft. Scrivener even provides an automatic option to do exactly that while keeping your original work intact.

There are many reasons why we may have fallen behind in our efforts to write.

After all, as mentioned above, this is not the easiest thing to do. There are plenty of distractions out there on the internet, if not elsewhere.

And then just when we get to a point where we are ready to unleash a torrent of mighty novel-writing, something can just … happen … to distract us from our authorly efforts.

It happens. And yes I know … authorly is not a real word. It is flagged by the spell checker too.

Or even worse, inspiration hits at exactly the wrong time. I don’t know about anyone else, but I usually have a pad of paper somewhere nearby when I go to sleep. Or I have a laptop, or a netpad, or something else in case inspiration strikes.

But mistakes happen …

So what can we do?

Cheat.

Yes, cheat. But in a way that doesn’t cause the NaNoWriMo Police to come knocking at our doors.

Personally I can think of three ways that I have used … or will use to accomplish this. After all this NaNoWriMo thing is a first draft after all. You don’t absolutely have to include everything that you write in the final product, right?

Idea Number One – The Other Novel

In my case I have already used this method of cheating this year. In a nutshell, I started to write a novel novella about a woman in a haunted hotel. Quite the good story. And I wrote like the wind.

For about three days.

Then the proverbial Writers Block / Blank Screen / Hey Look At The Facebook Page started to kick in … and creativity flew out the window. I couldn’t imagine what more to write to move the story line along.

So I started a new story.

BUT I kept the words I had already created in its own folder in Scrivener (or you could do it in a separate document till later in Word). After all the words were technically written this month toward the NaNoWriMo effort.

And besides an ML suggested I keep the count of the words, so it’s all good.

Idea Number Two – Journals

I used this idea in year number one. For those of you who are frequent readers you will recall that my foray into writing began with NaNoWriMo in 2011 … to help in the healing of a broken heart.

Part way through the month I realized that I was writing far more words by turning my “novel” into something more akin to a journal. Which accomplished two things.

First, I got the novel done. Second, it started me on a writing journey with a personal blog / journal diary that continues to this day.

Idea Number Three – This Blog

Okay, I haven’t actually done this one yet.

But if I find myself nearing the end of the month, and my main characters have not done anything interesting enough to fill up 50,000 words, I envision one of them having a blog … on WordPress … in which she writes about her efforts to successfully do a NaNoWriMo novel in the month of November.

And then of course all the words I wrote she wrote this month in the blog would appear as part of the novel.

Hey. Words is words.

Good luck to everyone as they start the final third.