Selfishness

Nanowrimo means you have to be selfish.

The most important thing you have is time. November is thirty days. You won't believe how many demands will be made on your time in that month. People will badger you, organisations pester you, employers require stuff of you. The army will try to draft you, government departments will mix you up with someone totally unlike you in every aspect, who isn't doing nanowrimo but who is committing tax fraud, and the police will try to arrest you. Pirates - for where there is nanowrimo, there are sure to be pirates - will try and pressgang you into their crew and take you off on exotic, swashbuckling adventures. But you have to be selfish, and learn to say no to everyone.

November is your month. Make sure people know it. They won't listen, and will try and pester you anyway with their petty concerns, but if you tell people in advance, then you can say "I did warn him your honour, that I needed to be left alone in November but he didn't listen," when you're in court for punching your (ex) friend for disturbing you on the 29th of November. So tell people. Then, insulate yourself.

Insulating yourself is making sure the people who are too selfish to heed your selfish demands for privacy, don't get near you. Borrow a friends big, ugly dog so that people won't come knocking at you door, switch the ringer on your phone to off, uninstall Messenger and close your facebook account so that your friends can't bother you with their useless lives.

Yes, your best friend may have spilt up with X (though you aren't sure who X is, you can't put a face to the name, because they've only been going out a week, and all her boyfriends are bland and interchangeable, anyway), and she might want you to comfort her and pamper her and tell her that she's a worthwhile human being and all men are swine. But she's got the rest of her life to get over her broken heart (and it isn't like she hasn't had practice), and you've only got one short month to complete Nano. Don't let anyone spoil it, no matter how much they want to.

So be prepared to be as selfish as it takes. Writers aren't necessarily nice people, but they are writers.