Day 58

What will you do to finish that book?

Me? Well, I’m not that dedicated but…

An organised writer will set aside time for all the processes he or she needs to do in a day, in order to get the job done.

We’re talking time management or a scale I couldn’t even begin to imagine. But, if you want to write a book in a reasonable timeframe, then you have to plan.

To me, if I was going to go down that path, I would need to know the following:

Book genre, a working title, approximate length in words, break down the parts of the story into what will eventually become chapters, know most of the characters and their functions, and spoiler alert, what a possible ending might be.

For me, for instance, the book is a thriller, it is about 80,000 words, it will have between 80 and 100 chapters. From there if I plan to write 2,000 words a day, it would take 40 days, but more realistically, if I write 500 words a day, it would be 160 days or six months. Taking time out, the average time it would take to write would be about one year.

Then, there’s that little matter of what you are prepared to do to finish it.

Will you go at it, day after day, until the first draft is finished? Having a plan, setting out the plot lines and writing to them, perhaps.

If you write like I do, by the seat of my pants, then all that goes out the window.

I use the NANOWRIMO method, of writing 50,000 words in a month, with no breaks, and providing the ideas keep coming, which they generally do. My books often start as short stories, and then carry on. I have done this once a year for the last seven years.

The thing is, once you start, you have to finish. If you don’t that germ of an idea that starts turning into words will stagnate, then become impossible. And if those around you cannot support you, I;m sure you can find an attic somewhere on the internet when you can lock yourself away until it is done.