You might read the title and scoff. I’m sure some of you are offended. Outraged. Rolling your eyes.
But do you have a published book?
I do, and it’s available right here.
So maybe hear me out, and I can share all my tricks.
After years of throwing my time away, shelving projects or burning myself out and leaving them in the WIP (work in progress) stage, I finally managed to make my dream come true. I used every excuse in the book to stop myself. I have a day job. I have familial obligations. That laundry needs folding and that bathroom needs scrubbing.
Anything to avoid writing.
I’m a writer, and I hate writing. It’s a complicated relationship. I’m wondering how many times the blank Word document has to beat me up before I finally leave it.
Despite all of this, I received a challenge one month ago.
Write a book in a month.
I scoffed. I said it couldn’t be done. I needed to plan. Prepare. Write and rewrite. Hate the final product and start again. I didn’t even touch the idea of formatting and heavy editing. At best, I thought I could write a book in a few months. Stories require care. Attention to detail. Passion.
Jesus, did I always sound this pretentious?
A story just needs the writing to back it up. I faced a simple choice: nut up or shut up.
I physically can’t shut up, so I truly only had one option.
One of the trickiest parts – obviously – was time management. Admittedly, I struggled. I wanted to fall back into old habits and distract myself. Pull up YouTube and watch cute animals. Go to the kitchen and make a complicated dessert. Take my nephew shopping for toys he absolutely doesn’t need.
Of course, there were rules I set for myself.
- Keep the story 80 pages or less. As much as I hate to admit it, people don’t enjoy reading anymore. They want listicles. Raise your hand if you skipped to this part.
- Only write for ONE hour a day. This part drove me insane. Sometimes, the gears were turning so hard, I would’ve done myself a huge disservice by quitting. On those days, I allowed myself extra time. HOWEVER, I couldn’t exceed four hours. Those were the magic numbers.
- Turn off all distractions. Including music. Personally, one of my favorite parts of writing is having a soundtrack in the background to give me the right vibes. Music tells a story to me, and it helps me invent people and situations of my own. I find ways to relate to the character; getting inside their mind is significantly easier with the correct tunes. But it’s distracting. After writing without music, I don’t know if I’ll ever go back. I wrote more in one hour than I would in a whole day.
Shockingly, that covered everything. When I started this project, I wholeheartedly believed there would be more complications further down the road.
And there were!
But I’ll go into detail in the next post. For now, I suggest trying out the three tricks. Let me know if you start to see improvement!
Roughly speaking, what is the word count of eight pages (if you don’t mind my asking)?
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It ended somewhere in the 20k-25k range. I’d have to double check for a final count, but I will say, the 80 page rule did end up broken after edits.
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Thanks! It’s kind of like in the novella range. That seems totally more doable, even for a slow(er) writer like myself.
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You’re most welcome! I’m glad you see it that way; this is the goal I’m trying to accomplish by talking about my experience. It’s not as difficult as it might look.
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