Write that book for NaNoWriMo

If you fancy yourself as the next Leo Tolstoy, November is the month to prove it. NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – is back, and in the coming weeks more than half a million people will be putting fingers to keyboard. Despite the name, participants join in from all round the world, and you don’t necessarily have to write an actual novel: the goal is to simply tap out 50,000 words or more of fiction. Those could be a complete story, or a chunk of a longer novel – what matters is the word count.

While 50,000 words may sound a big number, over a 30-day month it breaks down to just 1,666 a day. If you put your mind to it, you can knock those out in an hour – and if you dictate rather than type, it’s less than half an hour’s composing.

Simply extemporising a book off the top of your head probably won’t yield the best results, however. Some authors can do it, but as a rule the secret to writing something worth reading, whether it’s a novel, memoir or work of non-fiction, is to come up with an interesting idea and thoroughly plan out