How I Wrote A Novel In 19 Hours

It was the end of the semester, my final year of college, deadlines flying at me from every direction. I was struggling to keep my head above water. The end of the year stress and lack of sleep that every college student is familiar with, had reached its climax. Only this time, the stakes were higher. At any previous point in my academic career, if I was worried about failing a class, I had a safety net to fall back on, “I can always retake the class next semester,” I would tell myself. But this time, there was no next semester. This was it. I was scheduled to graduate, and my graduating was riding on the fact that I pass the five classes in which I was enrolled. Of the five classes, the most crucial was Advanced Fiction Writing. This is because I was a creative writing major, and not only did I have to pass this class, I had to do so with a B minimum. However, as is so often the case in life, the most important things take the back burner to other, more immediate obligations. So, I completed my own version of hell week, doing academic somersaults to complete every assignment and sliding into home base with my various papers laying on silver platters for my teachers. Hoping they couldn’t tell from the bloodshot look in my eyes that I had started their assignment mere hours before it was due. But, as any veteran college student will tell you, this is standard procedure. The idea that anyone is going to complete their assignment, not in the last minute, is a whimsical fantasy. In the wise words of my college roommate, “pressure makes diamonds.” So this was more or less the principle that had pushed me through college, and up until this point it had worked flawlessly. But, it seemed that this time, with the final assignment of my college career, I had royally screwed up. I had decided to procrastinate the one thing that should never be procrastinated… a novel. That’s right ladies and gents, the final project for my Advanced Fiction class was, to write a novel.

“It does not have to be good,” my professor explained on the first day of class, “It does not even have to make sense. It just has to be complete.” The minimum word count was forty-thousand. This is the standard minimum length for a story to be considered a novel. Failure to reach this word count resulted in an automatic F, and for me would mean that I would not be able to graduate college. I distinctly remember the look in my professor’s eyes as he scanned the room, knowing full well that very few, if any, of us had ever written a novel, and there was perhaps a slight sense of twisted pleasure he got in knowing the horrific, painful task that lay before all of our naiive minds. He concluded by saying, “my advice, start now, and whatever you do, don’t leave this assignment until the night before it’s due.”

So here I sat, staring at the story in which I’d had an entire semester to write. I pulled up the word count to reveal six thousand words, a measly twenty pages. I had the entire semester to do this, and twenty pages were all I had to show for it. The time was four o’clock in the afternoon. The story was due, in class, at eleven o’clock the next day. I pulled out my phone’s calculator and proceeded to do some crude calculations (there’s a reason I was an english major). What I read on the screen I could not believe. I re calculated again and again. It was not until this moment that the gravity of the situation truly set in for me. If I were to complete this novel I would have to write a little over 1500 words an hour, every hour, for the next nineteen hours straight, until the minute the story was due.

Something in my stomach dropped. I leaned back in my chair and started to go over the options in my head. After a minute or two I realized that there literally weren’t any options to go over. Without another moment of hesitation I started desperately pounding my fingers against the keyboard.

I stood outside my school’s library smoking a cigarette. It was ten o’clock, six hours into my impossible mission. I had just done a calculation on my phone, and realized that I had fallen behind on my word count. I had been unable to maintain the pace of 1500 words an hour. In order to regain my pace and be back on track, I gave myself the task of writing 3000 words over the course of the next hour. Before tackling this objective I decided I would go outside to smoke a cigarette. The first and only break I’d taken in six hours of writing. I spent ten minutes outside smoking the cigarette as slowly as possible. Dreading returning back to my desk. Finally the time had come, nothing remained in between my fingers but a smoldering butt. I walked back into the library and towards where I had been sitting. “Hey, JP.” Someone had called my name. I whirled around to see a girl from my fiction class. I asked her how her novel was coming along and she motioned to the printer she was standing next to. A stack of papers lay there. She had finished her novel. She said something along the lines of, “I just finished up, can’t wait to go home and get some sleep.”

Something inside me broke. In this moment I felt that I existed on an entirely different plane of reality from this person. The word “sleep” echoed in my head like something foreign to me, something alien. “How about you, are you almost done?” she asked. I told her, and a look of sheer terror appeared on her face. I told her I really had to get going and she wished me luck. As I returned to my desk I felt a sort of anger growing inside me, a frustration. These feelings did not come from jealousy or envy, although I was envious of the fact that she was going to sleep. These feelings stemmed from one singular place; desire. I desired to have what she had, a completed novel, something that I had written myself, that I could be proud of. I sat down at my computer and proceeded to type 3000 words in an hour.

I had a few slip ups throughout the night, most notably at 5 AM when I started to really feel myself fading due to lack of sleep. But after I drank yet another coffee, I felt rejuvenated and I was able to maintain my breakneck pace of 1500 words per hour, and then some. I’ll never forget the moment I pulled up my word counter and read 40100 words. I didn’t believe it at first, it didn’t feel real. I realized I still had to leave myself enough time to print the thing so I wrapped up the story as concisely as I could, and printed my novel. A grand total of 143 pages and 40786 words. As I held the stack of papers in my hand an immense feeling of satisfaction and pride overcame me. I did it, I actually did it. Of course I’d had my doubts, but I didn’t dwell on them. I didn’t have time to. For the past nineteen hours one hundred percent of my cognitive awareness had to be focused on writing. As I walked out of the library and the sunlight struck my face, my body was flooded with an intense rush, a high, a kind of buzz. I couldn’t help it as I nearly skipped from the library to my class. I felt incredible, better than I ever had in my entire life, never mind that I missed a night of sleep, I felt like a could’ve run a marathon. I entered class a minute or two late, and was shocked to find that the moment I walked into the classroom, I was greeted with applause. My professor said, “we were taking bets on whether you would show up.” Apparently the girl from my class that I had run into the night before had told everyone about how she saw me in the library. I sat down with my story sitting in front of me, prepared to turn it in. Underneath a Crimson Moon is a juvenile story about vampires that takes place in Toronto. It is filled with cheesy lines, overused metaphors, and an unnecessary amount of action sequences. It is not the best novel ever written, but it isn’t necessarily the worst either. The characters all make sense and have clear motivations. And the plot ended up coming together remarkably well. As I found out later, there was an irritatingly large number of grammar and spelling mistakes, but this does not surprise me seeing as how I finished writing with so little time, I didn’t even have a chance to edit. What did surprise me though, was that I passed the assignment and finished with an A in the course. I learned many things from this experience, not the least of which is that you should not try to cram an entire novel into a night. But, it is possible to do this. And the craziest part is, the story wasn’t half bad. Imagine what I could do if I actually spaced the writing out!

Someone asked me recently what the best cure for writer’s block is. I told them simply, pressure. If there is some sort of a deadline, some sort of a ticking clock, there is no choice but to write. Writer’s block is not a concrete wall, it is not an all powerful entity. It happens to all writers, but it is something that can be pushed through. If you provide yourself with pressure you will force yourself into a situation where you have to figure out a way to get around writer’s block where, without said pressure, you might just give up.

See, human beings do really well with external motivation. Think about it, you wake up and go to your job every day, even if you don’t want to, because there is an external pressure to do so. If you don’t show up, you get fired. The problem with writing, and other creative endeavors, is that they rely on internal motivation. You decide when to write and how much to write, and if you don’t feel like writing one day, there are no real consequences to that. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist my entire life. I’ve written countless stories, but I’ve only actually completed a handful. I have an entire folder in my computer dedicated to would be novels, but I never got past twenty to thirty pages on any of them. That is because I didn’t have any real reason for completing them other than I wanted to, for fun. And writing novels is no easy task. Doing it for fun may be a strong enough motivation to start, but not to finish. The first story I actually wrote from start to finish was something I had to do for school. It is very difficult to complete things simply of your own free will.

My advice to anyone struggling with writer’s block, or struggling to complete some sort of creative project (it doesn’t even have to be writing) is to try and apply some sort of external pressure. My case is a very extreme one, but the solution does not have to be that extreme. Something as simple as promising a family member that you will send them your novel by October 1st. Or you can look up a writing contest. Writing contests often have prompts and due dates as to when you must submit by. Better yet, get in contact with a publisher or a literary agent.

The number one thing that this experience taught me is that, if you are the only one holding yourself accountable, it’s likely not going to be enough. There needs to be people relying on you, there needs to be solid dates of completion, and if enough external pressure is applied, you will figure out a way to complete your project, I guarantee it.