With my 1st Draft done, I got to thinking wouldn’t it be cool to write a novel in 6 months. Now I know it’s too late for me, I’ve been writing this novel for well over two years. Which reminds me of a saying that I had once heard “You have an eternity to write the first one,” I forget how the rest of it goes, but I do recall that it insinuated that after that you tend to have to write on deadlines.
I would want to write a novel in 6 months, or at least my next one, but how do you do it? I looked to a few authors who have not only a great reputation as Novelists but who seem fully capable of releasing a new book in approximately 6 months to a year.
Terry Goodkind: Author of the much loved SWORD OF TRUTH series has always got a new novel over 6 months to a year. After reading the 4th novel of his series, it felt like I was reading the same story again and again, which made it predictable. After reading the first three again I could see a definite pattern, he is what I would call a formula writer. Whether he does it on purpose or not is besides the point, this is how he managed it (apart from long hours of dedication and perseverance no doubt). He’s still one of the highest paid writers and still a best seller!
Terry Pratchet: Best Selling author of the Discworld series. He writes satire, he takes a not so original concept and turns it on its head. The story is already there, but the way he tells it makes it seem original and at the very least entertaining. To me this is the marking of a true artist, some one who can sell you something that you’ve already read. I particularly like the Witches novels because of the fact that they seem to mimic Shakespearian themes.
Don’t come down on anyone for making old material seem fresh and new, after all there doesn’t seem to be an original idea or theme that hasn’t already been done. So we start with an idea, we can start with a story that has already been written, and then we ask ourselves “What if?”
What if Hansel and Grettel found a nice witch? What if the big bad wolf decided that it would have been easier to just eat the little girl out right and then eat the grandmother? What if Aladdin’s lamp had an evil genie? Okay so we have an idea, or the makings of one.
There are two ways to do this. In animation, we call them pose by pose and straight ahead. Pose by pose suggests planning and forethought but it can make the animation look mechanical or forced, particularly if the animator is inexperience. Straight ahead is pretty much drawing the first pose, followed by drawing each sequential image until you’re done. This can result in random beats, and can sometime lack continuity. These same principles can be used for writing.
You can plan out your novel or story, or you can start with once upon a time and not stop until you’re done. I’ve tried the Straight Ahead method and I can’t get passed to middle when I do that. Planning the novel was painful and labor intensive for no good reason, but it worked for me. Surprisingly it still left room for creative juice and problem solving and ever important “What If?” question.
Novel planned out or rough idea of where you want to go with your story? Good. Now the hard part.
Somewhere in my research I was told that for a first time novelist you can write anywhere from 80,000 to 120,000 words. Don’t limit yourself of course, write to your little hearts desire, just be warned that it isn’t too often that Publishers want to risk printing a large manuscript for a newbie. To add to that if you have an editor, you can expect to cut down your word count significantly, which might leave you a sobbing or wrathful idiot, so don’t get attached to the words.
I did some math, just out of curiosity to see how many words I would need to write daily if I wanted to publish in 6 months. I did a minimum and a maximum count.
If I did my math right it is as follows:
80,000 Words/6 Months = 13,333(.3333 indefinitely) Word per Month. We’ll round off the number to 13,400 for simplicities sake.
13,400 Words/4 Weeks = 3350 Words per Week.
3350 Words/7 Days = 478.(whatever) Words per Day.
The answer to 120,000 Words is 714 Words per Day.
I did my math knowing that I had 5 months before I would be uprooting myself (assuming that things didn’t go according to plan). I also know that I can roughly write 1,000 words per hour, but since I have other things that I need to see to over the course of the day I set a two hour time frame for myself. This tells me that I could potentially have something acceptable as a 2nd in a little over a month. I forget how I did the math 
Now it comes down to routine and actually doing the work. More on that when I figure it out.
