How to Write Your First Novel in Under 4 Weeks

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How many times accept you started work on a novel, just to carelessness the project a few weeks subsequently? Later all, between work, family, and slumber, there simply aren't enough hours in the 24-hour interval to get what's in your caput down on paper.

Believe it or not, writing a novel takes less fourth dimension than you might think. If yous tin ready aside a few hours a day for just 4 weeks, y'all can finally finish the novel yous've been meaning to write for years.

If you're serious about writing your first novel, and so just do it. And if you lot wanna exercise it fast, here are some tips for doing it in nether iv weeks.

1. Set up Your Goals (Just Know Your Limits)

What is a novel, to yous? Is it 50,000 words, or 100,000? Figure out how long your novel needs to be, then, figure out how many words you write per 60 minutes. Once you know those two figures, you lot will exist able to see if your goal is reasonable given the number of hours you lot tin can commit to writing each day over the next four weeks.

According to author Dean Wesley Smith, "Nearly professional writers tin average about grand words an hour, when going on a novel. Not in the struggle of the beginnings, but once the novel is underway. So, simple math says that to write a 90,000 word novel, you lot accept about 90 hours of work."

Assuming that you can go along up that pace, Smith says y'all should exist able to creepo out an entire novel in under a month: "Using that 90 60 minutes number, divide by 3 (weeks) and you become 30 hours per week. Split up that by vii days and you get almost iv ½ hours per day, or converted to words, 4,500 words per day, which in 21 days will get you a 94,000 give-and-take novel."

Keeping upwardly that footstep might exist tough for a kickoff-fourth dimension novelist, just there'south a lilliputian jerk room in there that means you tin nevertheless get your novel done in less than a calendar month. And if your novel merely needs to clock in around 50,000-60,000 words, yous might only need 2 weeks. Starting to audio feasible, right?

2. Go Public

Yep, we writers are solitary creatures. Merely telling friends and family unit that you accept set this aggressive goal for yourself makes you lot answerable for your project. If you set a goal to consummate a novel in four weeks and fail, chances are your Aunt Mildred will bring it up at your next family unit dinner. If Aunt Mildred's disdain isn't plenty to motivate you, then I don't know what is.

three. Be Part of a Community

Consider writing your novel during November, also known as National Novel Writing Calendar month. During NaNoWriMo 2009, over 165,000 participants signed up to endeavor and write a novel in just 30 days, and over 30,000 of them succeeded. If you lot cull to participate in NaNoWriMo, and then yous volition have support from other participants, weekly "pep-talk" emails from the organizers, and invites to local writing parties hosted in your surface area.

If you lot think that speedy writing doesn't lead to proficient writing, take note: To engagement, 27 novels written during NaNoWriMo take been printed by major publishers, and I'm certain plenty of others are earning money for their authors through e-book or impress-on-need sales.

4. Have a Plan

Noted fantasy author Jeff VanderMeer wrote "Predator: Due south China Seas" in simply 8 weeks, but he probably could have gotten done in 4 if he wasn't likewise working total-time and working on other novels at the same time. He wrote a great blog mail near how he was able to pull this off back in 2008, and it includes great advice on how to best fix for writing nether a tight deadline.

"Most of the time, I wrote new scenes in the mornings, revised existing scenes in the afternoons, and spent my evenings on line-edits and rewrites of private paragraphs here and there," he explained. "By structuring my time this way, I made meliorate progress than if I'd merely focused on doing new scenes all day until the novel was done."

VanderMeer also urges writers to outline the entire novel in item before actually starting the writing process: "If possible, make certain that you have a i- or two-line description of the action for a item chapter or scene. Know going into the writing for a calendar week exactly what each scene is supposed to do and why…If you don't know that, you will spend most of your creative energy just trying to figure out what should exist happening."

5. Put the Pedal to the Metal

If four weeks doesn't seem challenging plenty, why not write your novel in just two? This is what Suzanne Pitner calls "Fast Drafting", and if yous can set aside 14 days to practice zilch simply write, y'all can put together a manuscript of 70,000 words in that time period by writing v,000 words per 24-hour interval.

Basically, only drib everything and do nothing simply write. Chances are you lot get at least two weeks of vacation time each year, and so why not take it all at once? Maybe 2022 is the twelvemonth that you actually do something important with your downtime.

The Bottom Line

In that location are a lot of other tips I could give y'all, from working in a distraction-gratuitous surround to incentivizing the writing procedure with pocket-size rewards along the fashion. But the most important communication is this: don't be agape of failure. Chances are, fright is the but thing belongings y'all back.

To become over your fear of failure, you need to throw caution to the air current. Write equally if your life depends on it. And if you lot get scared, just retrieve of how unlike your life volition be in just four weeks. That should exist all the incentive yous need to accomplish your goal.

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/how-to-write-your-first-novel-in-under-4-weeks.html