I’ve been writing a novel since November, and I’m just hitting the final straight of the first draft. It’s been an interesting exercise, and I’ve learned quite a few things along the way. One of the biggest things was adopting the Pomodoro technique.
Over the years, I’ve tried loads of different productivity techniques, and none of them really worked that well for me. Pomodoro, 52-17, 45-15 etc. I’m a little bit ADD, so hyperfocussing is something that comes naturally to me for certain things. Coding in particular. But when it comes to writing, I’ve always struggled. And I’ve never really figured out why.
I can get absorbed in a web project and become so focussed on it, I’ll drop everything to make sure it gets done. But as much as I love writing, especially the creative buzz of magicking strange worlds out of thin air, I’ve never been able to really get stuck in and get utterly absorbed in it, the same way I do with coding. I assumed this was because the mental effort was so much more for writing than for coding. Coding, for me at least, is 25% creating, 70% bug fixing and 5% wanting to defenestrate my computer.
I tried to figure out what I could do to maximise my writing, so that I could consistently get the buzz and excitement of writing, without the mental burnout.
First off, I plotted the whole thing. Thoroughly. Something I’d never done before. That in itself paid dividends, because I found it much easier to keep going, knowing roughly where I was heading. My first novel, The Elementalist, written fifteen years ago, was pantsed to the max, relying on my knowledge of story structure to keep things on track. The result was a shortish book (55k words) because I found the mental load of plotting on the fly too much. It’s probably also why it took me this long to have another go at writing another novel.
I’d done a bit of research and learnt that, as I’m writing a fantasy novel, I should be looking at around 120,000 words. I’m not sure why fantasy is expected to be a third longer than your average novel, but if that’s what people want, then that’s what I would deliver.
The plotting done, I started to write. I tried to keep a word tally of around 2,000 words a day. I use Ulysses, so it was interesting to look back at my progress, and I was pleased with how I was getting on. By Christmas, I’d reached 56,000 words, a thousand more than The Elementalist, and not even halfway through!
Unfortunately, Christmas put something of a dampener on my progress, and I struggled through January to get anywhere near the word count of December. I had been working for DVSA and was finishing that contract mid-January, so the extra work to get everything tidied up before I left meant there was little mental capacity to focus on the novel. I kept going, trying to do the old 100 words a day routine, even if it just meant a few hastily typed words in Mr Whippet’s café on my lunchtime stroll.
The contract ended, and I spent a week or two unwinding and mostly messing about with Noku Puzzle. Over 12 months working full-time with only two weeks off, one of which was spent installing a new kitchen, had left me jaded, to say the least.
As February started, and I’d got done what I wanted to get done on Noku Puzzle, so I started to get the word count up again on the novel. But I still felt I was missing a trick. I wasn’t sure if it was time management, or what. So I started analysing what I was doing, trying different things out. Then, for some reason, the Pomodoro technique popped into my head. I had a timer on my desk, so I set it to 25 minutes and started writing. As the bell rang, I realised I’d done 500 words - that was a thousand words an hour! Without really breaking into a sweat. Suddenly, I started seeing novel writing in a granular way, the same way I saw coding, and everything clicked into place.
On that first day (day 66 on the chart below), I matched my best ever day of 3,770 words. Through the rest of that week my word count went 7,379 words, 6,434 words, 6,014 words, 4,136 words. All in 500-600 word sprints. And because I was forcing myself to take regular breaks, rather than keep going until I ‘got to a decent word count’, I was able to do more.
By the end of last week, I’d smashed through the 100,000 word mark and ended up just shy of 112,000 words. This week has been half-term, and everyone’s off, even my son came back from Uni for a few days. I knew it would be a bit of a write off (if you’ll excuse the pun) so my target this week was to get to 120,000 by Sunday evening. As of writing this post, I should hit it, but there’s decorating to be done, too!
Here’s a little chart of my word count up to today:
Next week, my goal is to blast through the last 15-20,000 words. If I buckle down, I should do it...
If you’re a writer, how do you manage your writing time? Would be interesting to compare notes. I’m always open to improving things.