It’s NaNoWriMo 2016, so I’ve quickly put together these 9 Things Not to Do in NaNoWriMo, along with reposting my 9 Things You Need to Write a Novel.

I hope you find them useful. They’re based on the bits of advice I most often find myself giving students.

Any comments, or additional don’ts, welcomed.

1. Don’t Bore Yourself

When I’m starting a writing class, I usually emphasise that the most important thing in a first draft isn’t the idea, it isn’t the atmosphere, and it certainly isn’t the individual sentences.

The most important thing in the first draft is excitement.

If you write what you know are in-between bits, they will read as in-between bits.

You need to be excited by what you’re writing, so that the reader gets excited by it.

This isn’t dependent on genre. For a romance writer, they can be romantically thrilled; for an experimental writer, they can be experimentally stoked.

If you…