Ray Bradbury said it best: “Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.

My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this: Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailors worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what’s possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in our mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.

The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy.

The first law of exuberant imperfection is essentially this: The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy.

In the context of novel writing, this means you should lower the bar from “best-seller” to “would not make someone vomit.” Exuberant imperfection encourages you to write uncritically, to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens. In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable. So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low.

The roar of adrenaline drowned out the self-critical voices that tend to make creative play such work for adults.

There's an old folk saying that goes: whenever you delete a sentence from your NaNoWriMo novel, a NaNoWriMo angel loses its wings and plummets, screaming, to the ground. Where it will likely require medical attention.

Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.

Don’t be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing; the idea ofwriting a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.

If you have a million things to do, adding item number 1,000,001 is not such a big deal. When, on the other hand, you have nothing to do, getting out of bed and washing yourself before 2:00 P.M. feels like too much work to even contemplate.