Little And Often? Or All In One Go?
Can You Write A Novel In One Sitting?
My target for writing my current novel is 6,000 words per week. It will be around 70,000 words in total, so I should have this written in around 12 weeks, the first draft anyway. I was sitting planning my time last night when I pondered how to schedule my writing.
Should it be around 850 words per day every day? This was a new concept to me.
Should it be 1,500 words, four days per week? This is how I have been writing for over a year.
Or could it be something really different to that? I wondered what it would be like to write the first draft of a full novel in one sitting.
Writing A Novel
Actually sitting down and writing a novel is the easy part as far as I have found. The typing words onto a page, building sentences and ideas is loads of fun. It is easy to do when you set aside the time, have no distractions and feel it.
I can write at the rate of around 1,200 to 1,600 words per hour when I’m flowing, which is most of the time I’m writing. This means that the 850 words per day would take me around half an hour to 45 minutes. The 1,500 words should take around an hour.
How about writing the whole thing quickly?
If we look at 70,000 words as being sufficient for the first draft then this would take around 47 hours of writing. Now I’m not advocating a Guinness World Record attempt of nonstop writing for 2 days flat. A few things would happen.
- You would stop being productive at some point
- Your story would lose flow
- You would feel unwell
- You would probably end up hating writing
But, a 47 hour work week isn’t out of the question. We often work longer hours than normal when we have a tight deadline or a major project going on. Why isn’t your next novel that project?
How good would it feel to start Monday morning with a blank page and finish up on Friday afternoon with a completed first draft of a novel?
Writing a novel can be crunched into a short space of time if you prepare right and clear the decks of other work. Up for it?
