Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Today, The Great Courses Plus—a video-on-demand service for lifelong learning—shares some advice from great writers they’ve partnered with. The Great Courses Plus is a NaNoWriMo 2020 sponsor.

The past few months have probably shown you a different world than the one you’re used to: outside your door, there’s less commuter traffic, fewer crowds waiting to be seated at the local eatery or queueing up for the opening of the latest movie, no kids chasing each other with sticks and screaming as they wait for school buses.

Inside your door, however, it’s a whole new world. That’s because your job, your school, your favorite restaurant, your movie theater… all of your outside worlds are now contained within the four walls you call home. And all that chaos is stuck inside with you. (We know. We live there, too.)

Even if you don’t have children, pets, or additional adults going stir crazy around you, 2020 has provided enough chaos on a daily basis that it’s almost impossible to focus on a five-word tweet, let alone commit to a 50,000-word novel. The positive side is that these distractions could turn into some pretty fantastic book fodder. But of course, sitting down and writing about this hectic time while still in the midst of it? Well, that’s a completely different story.

To help out, we turned to some of our favorite writing professors to see what they are doing to get themselves through these trying times:

You wrote a novel! Now what? NaNoWriMo’s “Now What?” Months are here—this January and February, we’ll be helping you guide your novel through the revision and publishing process. Today, James Scott Bell, author and editor, shares his revision road map:

Ah December! It follows November, and a good thing, too. It gives you a month to let your NaNo-novel cool off in the meat locker of your writer’s brain. Then cometh January, of which Day 1 is given to recovery from the night before, sleep, football, and food. 

And a little planning, too––a plan to revise your novel with more than just a slapdash run through. Here are the steps: