Writer's Wednesdays: Keeping yourself healthy during NaNoWriMo
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While participating in NaNoWriMo, it is essential to keep up with a peculiar thing named "health". This curious pattern found in the human body is needed to keep the imagination flowing, the words pounding, and the characters, ahem, charactering.
"But how," you ask. "How can I keep up with it? I've got to write over a thousand and a half words a day! I don't have time for 'health'."
Oh, yes you do.
Ignoring your health can cost you words, big time. Ever try to write when you've only gotten two hours of sleep, or you have to go to the bathroom every few minutes? It ain't pretty.
Thankfully, keeping up with your health is fairly easy to do, once you know how. Remember all the planning you've been doing to make room for your word count? You can do the same with your health planning. Ensure you have enough room in your schedule for things such as:
Sleep
The healthy adult needs at least seven to nine hours of uninterrupted sleep every day to function properly, regardless of how heavy their workload is. Not six hours. Not four hours. And not three. Seven to nine hours is the norm, and disregarding this norm may be why your creativity is, sadly, lacking.Think about it. If your brain is working extra hard to keep you awake, is it really going to spend the extra resources to come up with new lands, new characters, and new plots? Our brains are time-saving, resource hoarding, lazy machines (at least, mine is), and if they can skimp on work, they will.
Get some sleep. If you find yourself suffering from insomnia, here is a list of things you can do to lull yourself into that happy, happy land:
- Turn off all electronic devices at least thirty minutes before bedtime. Not only do the lights excite your brain, but you can also find yourself scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through tons and tons and tons of posts and posts and posts--you get the picture.
- Get into a solid bedtime routine. Take a bath, brush your teeth, read a few pages of that lovely technical manual that came with the coffee machine you bought a few months ago, then go to sleep. Or something like this.
- Don't do any activities that you might get really into before going to sleep. For instance, don't read that new book just before going to bed. The same goes for writing. Try to get your word count in an hour or two before bedtime, unless you find writing to be a particularly sleep-inducing activity.
- Go to sleep at the same time every night, and wake up at the same time every morning, even on the weekends. You can break from your schedule every now and then, but try not to, if you can help it.
- If you can't sleep because you're worrying about something, try writing it down, talking to a friend or loved one about it, or, if it's a simple task that can be accomplished within 20 minutes, complete the task.
- Get some physical activity in during the day. It's a lot easier to sleep when you feel tired.
Eating healthy
Pushing yourself to every feasible limit to finish a novel is no excuse for not getting in three healthy meals a day. Sure, it's okay to just pick up fast food and call it good--sometimes--but this kind of diet can have dire consequences to your creative health. Those fast food tacos might look great (and taste delicious), but when you're getting up from your writing chair every few minutes to go to the bathroom--well, let's just say you might actually save time by putting together a simple salad at home.
A good way to keep yourself on a healthy diet is to plan easy-to-prepare, inexpensive meals for the entire month of NaNoWriMo. Ensure you eat plenty of vegetables and protein, and drink lots of water, too. (I'm no food expert, of course, so I'll let the folks over at Berkley Wellness take over from here.)
Also, don't have snacks on your desk--I don't know about you, but whenever I take a bag of chips to my desk, the entire thing seems to magically disappear within ten minutes. Seriously. There's some kind of gremlin or elf that takes them all, or something...
Water in a tightly sealed water bottle by your desk is a big help when trying to stay hydrated and write at the same time, by the way. You don't have to get up in the middle of a plot twist, and the worry of a liquid spill on your brand-new laptop is practically eliminated.
Exercise
*internal screaming*
Yep, in order to keep the old creative juices flowing, you've got to do some kind of physical activity. Staring at the screen for too long can and will make you feel yucky, and can lead to chronic writer's block.
The exercise you do during your writing doesn't have to be full-on marathon running or weight pumping, of course. Pulling yourself away every twenty minutes or so to do jumping jacks is a good way of refreshing your brain. The key is to find what you feel comfortable with and like doing, then do that. (Personally, I like squats.)
Some ideas for getting some activity in the day:
- Go on a walk, with or without a dog.
- Move around the house, cleaning up each room. Two birds, one stone!
- Do some yoga.
- Put some music on and dance your heart out.
- Take a bike ride.
- Do wall push-ups.
Take breaks to socialize
Remember those people in your living room? Or that friend you were supposed to meet at the coffee shop?
People are meant to socialize and have relationships, regardless of what kind of personality they have. It keeps us healthier and happier than simply talking to the characters in our heads. If you aren't convinced by that, what if I told you that 'hanging out' improves your writing? Yup! New experiences make for better writers, and discussing things with people can help with static dialogue.
Whether you simply move to the coffee shop for an hour or two or meet up with a group of writers at a convention, try to poke your head out of the hobbit hole every once in a while, just to see what's going on.
Now that you know what to implement into your schedule, why not try doing it now? Get your routine down before NaNoWriMo hits, and you'll be sure to succeed!
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