For those of you who have participated in NaNoWriMo, most of you will know about the Mid NaNo Rut.

But for those of you who haven’t witnessed it yet, here is a little bit of a dramatization:

*She sits staring into the abyss that is her Mac Book Pro, her coffee is just a little bit too bitter and her finger just can’t seem to move. Her mind is spinning in every direction except her in the direction her novel is going in, and all she can think about is crying while eating peanut butter and watching vintage horror movies. All she can do is hope that tomorrow she will hit her daily goal, but who knows what tomorrow holds.*

I refuse to admit that this was me last year (IT TOTALLY WAS)

The Mid NaNo Rut is both so easily prevented and so easily contracted, making it so much more difficult to deal with. But here are some ways to prevent it, and get rid of it!!

Preventing the RUT:

– Don’t exhaust your ideas too fast. Yes I know you’re excited but try to steadily write just your word count every day and nothing more. If you don’t give yourself a break every day, NaNoWriMo will be miserable.
– Don’t think about word counts, if you are like me, you will have that NaNo profile tab open and you will be updating that word count every 5 words. It’s not about the count until later in the month!
– If you’re a pantser you need to be super strict in that you don’t go off on too many tangents, sometimes it is so so easy to write in one direction and get lost with no way back. I mean most of the time it’s awesome, but other times you can get some overwhelmed and lose all motivation.
– Planners, don’t over plan. Simple as that. If you want to write a novel, you have to enjoy it at least a little bit!

Getting Rid of the RUT:

– word sprints!!
– twitter #Nanowrimo
– talk to people in the forums, even in your regional forums, see if anyone can talk to you about their novels so far, that’s got to be one of the most motivating things ever.
– linked to the point above, get a little bit competitive, but always friendly competitive, in the end everyone’s a winner, so don’t go sabotaging!
– take a nap! If you have a scheduled time to write for NaNo each day, and you are having trouble writing at that time because of the RUT, you need to go do something else super important during that time so that later on in the day you can go back to your novel and crank out some words!

Really hope this helps, My personal trick for the rut is doing writing prompts that could possibly tie in with my story. It will surprise you how much you can get written from a simple word prompt.

Let me know some of your experiences with the RUT, or how you get past it or prevent it! ❤