How Long to Allow to Write a Book
This week on Ask Me Anything we take a question from Joel Canfield.
How do you decide how long to allow for writing a book? Do you set a time goal like one year, or do you let it take as long as it takes and trust the daily writing ritual to keep you on track?
Recommended reading: Henry Miller’s Rules of Writing
TRANSCRIPT:
Steve: I think this is a great question when we’re thinking about organizing a year—and Shawn, jump in on this and Jeff, jump in on this whenever you want to. The key concept here I think, is thinking in blocks of time. Not just going one day at a time because that’s like setting off for Tahiti in a sailboat and you just figure, “Well I’m just going to keep sailing west.” You’ve got to have a chart and you’ve got to know how long it’s going to take.
For instance, I was reading—I can’t remember this writers’ name, but he’s like a very established thriller writer, a brand named guy—and he was saying that it takes him to do a first draft of a novel, it takes him 200 hours. So, again, this is under the theme of thinking in blocks of time. So, let’s say that you’re a mom, or a single mom, or you’re working and you just don’t have a lot of time. So, you say to yourself “Okay. Two hundred hours. I can spend an hour a day doing something like that.” So, if you’re looking forward to 2014, you can say, “Okay. I’m gonna write . . . Here’s my goal. I’m going to write a first draft of the novel that I’m working on and it’s going to take me 200 hours exactly.” So, that means 200 days, if I can work 5 days a week, that’s 40 weeks. So, that’s not quite a whole year.
Now, what to me is very empowering about thinking in a block of time like that—it’s a little bit like the Foolscap Method—you can say to yourself, “Okay. Forty weeks. I can relate to that. I can do that. It’s not 10 years. I can serve that time.” The other thing you can say to yourself is “How am I going to feel at the end of 40 weeks when sitting on my desk is going to be a 315 page first draft of my novel?” You’re going to feel great—and so that is a great motivational tool. To think in that block of time of nine months let’s say. Now the other thing about this—why it really helps to think that way—is you can check yourself at say one month, and if you’re supposed to be 1/9th of the way through. Suppose you’re 1/9th and 10 pages of the way through at that going. You go, “Wow, I’m ahead of the game,” and that inspires you to keep going even more, and you can check your progress.
Now part of the question here was, “Do you set a time goal or do you take it as long as it takes?” I very definitely set a time goal, and I say “between now and my birthday, I’m going to do ‘x’. I’m going to write this many things.” And I go beyond that, and I think you do, Shawn. You probably do too, Jeff. Like if I’m going to start the first draft of a book, I’ll give myself a page number. I’ll just sort of pull it out of thin air and I’ll say “Okay, this is going to be 360 pages”—and to my amazement, when I do that, it comes out within like two or three pages of that every time. So, if I say 360 pages, I’m going to two a day, that is 180 days. So thinking in blocks of time over the course of a year is a great way to do something.
When I was working as a screenwriter, when I . . . At the original start of my career, I worked for about five years with a partner and we had one of these divorces where we had this fight, and he said to me “I can no longer work with you” and he hung up the phone. And my partner . . . He was the guy who got us the jobs. I was like the slave. I was the mule and he was the guy that got us the meetings and got us the jobs. So I was in a state of panic for about five days thinking, “How am I ever going to get it together here?” And, I just said to myself, “I’m going to take one year and I’m going to write two spec screenplays, six months each, and at the end of that time, if I can’t make a living, I’m going to move to plan ‘z’, whatever it is”. And, so I did write the two and they both sold. They were terrible, but they both sold.
So thinking in blocks of time is a great way to do it. I think . . . Decide what you’re aiming for and how long it’s going to do it, and then hold yourself to it.
Shawn: I’d love to follow up on that Steve because it speaks to, like . . . The 200 hours is a great sort of starting point. Here’s a way to make it even more specific to you—and I talked a lot about this in the book that I’ll eventually finish that is called The Story Grid. The usual novel is between 65,000 to 85,000 words, okay? If you think of your work in those terms—how many words per day as opposed to pages per day—because it’s easy to check your word count on Microsoft Word or whatever word-processing unit you’re using. Instead of sort of trying to become David Baldacci who can do it in 200 hours, find out how long it takes you to write a specific word count. For example, sit down and give yourself a task. Say you need to write one chapter. You need to write one great scene and you have to do it in say 1,500 words, which is actually a really nice word count for today’s reader. So 1,500 words, sit down, don’t edit yourself while you’re writing it. Please don’t do that. Just write the story 1,500 words and see how much time it takes. Then once you know, say it takes you three hours to do 1,500 words. So, you know every hour, it’s going to be about 500 words. And, then you can just go back and do the math and know “Well I want to write a little novella that’s going to be 60,000 words, and it takes me an hour per 500 words, then that’s two hours per thousand. That’s 120 hours to write 60,000 words—and that’s the first draft.” So, that’s another way so that you specifically can find out how long it’s going to take you, not, you know, Steve Pressfield who’s been doing it for 30 years.
Steve: That’s great. Let me add one other thing because I know that people who are hearing us talk like this Shawn, may be saying “Well isn’t that so formulaic or so disciplined. What about the madness? What about the craziness of creating art?” I think there’s a great piece—Henry Miller’s Rules of Writing. I actually stole it and put it on our website. It’s somewhere on our site in the archive, but it’s also in the archive of a really good site called Brain Pickings Weekly. Brain Pickings I think is the actual name of the site. Henry Miller’s a wild and crazy guy. He’s like sleeping in doorways, chasing women all over Paris, Brooklyn, blah, blah, blah, but you read his rules of writing, and he’s like the most disciplined guy imaginable. Get up in the morning, sit down, and write ‘x’ words . . . It’s really kind of an eye-opening thing, and I think that that’s the way real artists work. If you read Twyla Tharp’s daily thing, in her book The Creative Habit, she gets up every morning at the same time, goes, catches a cab, goes to the same gym, works out with the same trainer, goes back to the studio, does her dance. It’s very habitual. That’s just what it takes.
DO THE WORK
Steve shows you the predictable Resistance points that every writer hits in a work-in-progress and then shows you how to deal with each one of these sticking points. This book shows you how to keep going with your work.
THE AUTHENTIC SWING
A short book about the writing of a first novel: for Steve, The Legend of Bagger Vance. Having failed with three earlier attempts at novels, here's how Steve finally succeeded.
NOBODY WANTS TO READ YOUR SH*T
Steve shares his "lessons learned" from the trenches of the five different writing careers—advertising, screenwriting, fiction, nonfiction, and self-help. This is tradecraft. An MFA in Writing in 197 pages.
TURNING PRO
Amateurs have amateur habits. Pros have pro habits. When we turn pro, we give up the comfortable life but we find our power. Steve answers the question, "How do we overcome Resistance?"
This was helpful for me, writing my first novel with no point of reference to use as an anchor. Despite all of the useful books about writing, I believe that each of us has to figure out our own process along the way. I wrote my first draft – long-hand – in about three months, working every day. My next goal was to transcribe it into Word. Along the way I acquired Scrivener and took an online course on how to use it. Now the whole thing has been imported into Scrivener and I am printing chunks of it and having a great time with my red pen. I have moments of hysteria via Resistance, “Who do you think you are? You don’t even know what the hell you’re doing”, but it’s getting easier to answer “True, but I will know for the next one. BTW, get the hell out of my house and leave me alone.” In a nutshell, the combination of having timed goals for each chunk of work, plus trusting the process is getting me through. It’s terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Thanks to you all – the Black Irish Team and its readers who come here every week – for being an ongoing source of inspiration and advice!
I stinkin’ love you, Steven Pressfield. I’ve “done the work” for so long & so hard (a few agents have my full manuscript of novel #3), but YOU give me hope to keep pushing. It WILL happen…if I don’t quit.
Hello Steven,
Your books for writers have been a great help and inspiration.
I’m guessing, but the 200 hour guy you mentioned sounds to me like Jeffery Deaver. I’ve heard him speak at ThrillerFest. Heard him introduced as the writer who only has to add pronouns and articles to his outline and he’s done. Might be him.
Thanks for your site & these discussions.
Best!
Jacqueline
Ha! Completely forgot I’d asked this. In the short time since then I’ve settled into a more productive daily routine, and calculated the time I need to spend to finish my current novella by the 1st day of Spring.
Sailing to Tahiti without a chart would be the kind of madness I’ve gone through for years. Not no more!
I have a minimum time limit for my daily writing, but I also know my word goal to finish by the target date.
And I’m ahead of the curve, in part because of The Authentic Swing and Shawn’s Story Grid excerpts (along with the excellent Story Engineering by Larry Brooks.)
Super answer to my question. Thanks, guys.
I’ve read some of Twyla’s book and her thing is that something has to spark the habit. Yes she’s up early, but the thing that clicks her in is the moment when she hails that cab. That’s what I’m looking for. Resistance is a big problem.
I’ve been working at my art in twenty minute blocks of time. If I’m in the zone and paint smart, I can start and finish a small painting in that time. Ortherwise, I work on a larger painting for the twenty minutes, step away and return for another twenty. Any more and I could end up overworking it and have to trash it all.
So yeah, blocks of time working helps move me ahead.
What a great interview. I am a big fan. I really appreciate your honesty, humility, wisdom and generosity.
I agree. Readers want a relationship with writers, and vice versa. Some of them will want to become writers themselves. It’s the most natural thing in the world. I’m a songwriter, but it works the same way.
I stinkin’ love you, Steven Pressfield. I’ve “done the work” for so long & so hard (a few agents have my full manuscript of novel #3), but YOU give me hope to keep pushing. It WILL happen…if I don’t quit.
I can’t even imagine how long it will take for me to write a book, I can’t even cope up with my essays, and order them from writing services. I read reviews on Best Writers Online, and found a few reliable services, which I can apply to, when I need some college paper to be written.
Steven,
Your book “The War of Art” has approximately 25K words correct?
Thank you in advance,
Pat
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Many authors find it difficult to know how long to allow themselves to write a book, especially if they’re new to the craft. It’s important to remember that not every genre requires the same amount of writing time. It can even take days if the writer can hiring a professional paper writing service while writing their book! Fantasy, sci-fi, and historical novels typically take longer to write than fiction. Stephen King, for example, claims to write 2000 words a day, but most new writers can only manage to complete a chapter or two a day.
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