NaNoWriMo Dreamwidth Writers

What kind of start have you made? What was the difference between day one and day two of nano? How will you use the extra hour, if daylight savings ends for you tonight?

What are your best techniques for getting to the win? (Conversely, if you are yet to be a winner, what have you identified as things to avoid so you can win next time?)

Something that worked for me the one time I won, was actually a bit of advice from Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Millhone mysteries: write a little bit around your writing, some before you start and after you finish each session. I usually only wrote a couple of sentences; Ms. Grafton usually writes three or four times in this parallel journal what ends up in the book. In any case, the idea is that you (a) check in with yourself and your emotional state, (b) remind yourself of what you are going to write [when writing before] and what you will need to write next [at the end of a writing session], and (c) get distracting thoughts out of your head, blocking the writing, and on to paper, where you can leave them until the writing session is done.

(I suspect it also has some of the benefits of free-writing, where it just gets you into the physicality of writing, whether that's by pen, keyboard, dictation, or whatever you're doing, and, also, it means you're not confronted with a scary blank page while trying to tell a story.)

What do you do to get you through?