Sonja finds the camaraderie of NaNoWriMo a powerful motivator for writing, and can be found on the NaNoWriMo forums as “streetmouse”. You can read her advice for NaNoWriMo participants on her blog, White Picket Fences. For more information about Sonja, check out her website.

Why do you do NaNoWriMo? What benefits have you gotten from your participation?

My first year doing NaNoWriMo, I just wanted to see if I could write a novel. At all… in a month or in however long it took. As it turned out, I managed to win my first year, and that gave me the confidence to try to become a novelist. Now I do NaNoWriMo to keep proving to myself that I can finish novels. I don’t think novels get easier to write, I think you just have to know you’ve done it before and can do it again. I’ve finished two novels because of NaNoWriMo and gotten a confidence boost every year, knowing I can bang out a lot of words really fast.

How did you keep yourself inspired and motivated during NaNoWriMo?

I participate a lot in the forums, and especially in the chat room. I love getting egged on and I love to egg on my friends. I do a lot of word wars and a lot of complaining about novel writing being HAAAARD. The social aspects keep me going. And, I won’t lie, the competition helps too.

What sort of planning, if any, are you doing this year before you start writing?

I’ve got an outline and (shh!) the first little bit of a story done this year, so I’m ahead of the game. I always do outlines before I start writing. I am definitely NOT a seat-of-the-pants writer.

What are some of the tools you use to keep yourself organized and on-track during NaNoWriMo? How do you use them?

I love love love NaNoWriMo’s new tracking tools that let you compulsively check your wordcount and percentage and targets and all that good statistical stuff. I actually keep my own spreadsheet on non-NaNo months so I can do the same thing. It’s the competition thing again: I want to be ahead of the curve! My outline also keeps me going, especially when I sit down to write a scene. If I have an outline, at least I have some vague idea of what to write.

How do you manage your time during NaNoWriMo to make time for writing?

I write in the spare moments I can get, like lunch. I used to write for an hour every day on the bus. Sadly, I drive to work now, so that’s a no-go. I’ve been known to sneak in a few sentences at work, but I find that cutting out evening TV time is the best method for me. I sit next to my husband on the couch, pop in my headphones, and tap away while he watches his favorite shows or surfs the web.

What advice do you have for other writers doing NaNoWriMo for the first time?

Participate! Play with all the toys, use all the stuff on the website, buy the t-shirt, OWN it! The more you invest, the more you’ll get out.

Here’s how it works — you start reading a story, choosing options to move the story forward, and working your way though other people’s contributions until you reach a part that hasn’t been written or hasn’t been provided with options to move the story forward, what they call a “fragment”. Then, you start writing. Your segment will become one branch of the story’s structure, and others can rate it. Once it’s written, you only have 60 minutes to make changes before it’s locked for good (so that others aren’t caught out using elements in their new branches that you’ve deleted from the branch they’re building on).

Protagonize seems to have built up a fun, active community of writers — there are hundreds of stories and authors working on them. While it probably isn’t the place to write your next best-seller, if you’re looking for a fun way to connect with other authors, Protagonize might be just the thing.

Protagonize (Free)

Doesn’t make sense on the face of it, does it? How can sending people away from your site build traffic to your site?

Well, there are several ways linking to other sites can help build up traffic for your own.

1. Outbound links add value: If you post a link and explain why the site or page you’re linking to will be important to your readers, you’ve just done them a favor. They’ll remember how useful your site is.
2. Links let them know you’re there: When someone clicks a link on your site, your web address shows up in the referral log (a list of every site that’s sent traffic to a site) of the site you’ve linked to. If they start noticing a lot of traffic from your site, they’ll eventually come check it out, and hopefully become readers.
3. They’ll link back: The urge to return favors is strong in every human society. When someone notices you’ve linked to them, they may very well link back to you. If they have a lot of traffic, that’s a lot of people finding out about your site.

There are some ground rules, here. 1) Link to sites or articles that are really useful for your readers. 2) Link to sites or articles that you’ve read. 3) Don’t let your site become only links to other sites — this is common in sites that have run out of new things to say. 4) If you notice someone’s linked to you, link back to them — if they’re useful to your readers. 5) Don’t trawl for links — it’s unseemly.

Now’s as good a time as any to cover how to link to another site. If you’re using the visual editor in WordPress (it works like a word processor, with buttons for formatting text and other operations), click the button that looks like a chain link; if you’re in the code editor (where you write HTML code directly), click the “link” button. In both cases a window will pop up asking you to insert the URL of the link and the text you want your readers to click on.

If you’re writing HTML code directly, you use the anchor tag, <a>, to link out. The anchor tag looks like this: <a href=“http://www.dwax.org”>Dustin’s website</a>. “<a>” tells the browser it’s an anchor tag, “href” tells it what site to link to. You’ll insert the URL, with the “http://” at the beginning, where I have the URL for my site. Don’t forget the quotes. Replace “Dustin’s website” with whatever text you want your readers to see. The “</a>” closes the tag.

Common problems:

• The link doesn’t do anything: Check to make sure the URL is in quotes and has the “http://” part at the beginning.
• The link goes to an error page: Make sure the URL is correct and the page you’re linking to is still there.
• The whole paragraph is a link, now: Make sure you added the closing tag, </a>.