Purls of Wisdom: Or How I Intend to Write a Book in Three Months
How Does One Write Quickly Anyway?
The other week I was visiting my brother and a book in his library happened to catch my attention. No Plot No Problem: How to write a Book in 30 Days. It’s by Chris Baty, the founder of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).
For those who don’t know about NaNoWriMo, for the month of November you attempt to write a book as quickly as possible. The aim is 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s about 1666 words a day if writing every day. I’ve tried to write a book in that timeframe a handful of times, and every single time I end up “failing.”
That being said, I’d never read any of the literature related to NaNo, so I figured I’d give it a read. For reference, I’m trying to write my next book as quickly as possible, in about three months or so.
After reading through it, I discovered a few key points. First: this book is geared towards people who only write a book once a year. Most of the tips and tricks really would only work if you were only going to write a book once a year and forget about everything else for a month. Not a bad thing, per se, but not exactly useful to my present situation of trying to write a book every 3-4 months.
The Writing Totem
The second thing I took away from the book was the notion of a writing totem. A writing totem is something you only wear when you are writing. The author said he wears different hats depending on the kind of writing he’s doing. He also mentioned that one of the people who participated in NaNoWriMo had fingerless gloves.
The premise of a writing totem is simple: when you go to exercise, you wear exercise clothes. When you cook or clean house, you can wear an apron. When you garden, you wear gardening gloves and clothes that can get dirty. All of these are signals to your brain to let you know it’s time to do that particular activity.
Currently, when I sit down to write, I go to my office and I open my computer. End of ritual. And that end could apply to so many different things.
· I could be formatting
· I could be researching
· I could be doing “research” on YouTube
· I could be working on my marketing plan
· I could be planning my next D&D session
There are 5000 different things that could be the ending output of going into my office and opening my computer. But let’s say we add one more step to the list. I go into the office, I put on my writing gloves, and then I open my computer. How does that change the outcome?
So, I picked up some yarn and a crochet hook, set to work, and almost immediately stopped. I’ve never crocheted anything before, and as I was trying to learn I was getting quite frustrated. So, I picked up knitting (another skill I didn’t have) and found that I was much more natural at that craft. It still is a little lumpy and bumpy. I covered a few dropped stitches with flowers, and one of the gloves is a little longer than the other. But I love them, and perhaps if I’m only allowed to wear them when writing, it will help my brain to recognize when it is time to work.
The Paradox of Busy-ness
Third: The author mentioned that after writing a book in one month he thought if he cleared his schedule for three months, he’d be able to get a lot more done. So, he went and saved up a bunch of money so he could take a leave from his job for three months and arranged for his outside activities to be put on pause.
He soon discovered that he couldn’t write. When you have a million things to do it’s easy to add one more thing to the list. If you have nothing to do, it seems like a ridiculously hard task to even add one more thing to the list. So he would find himself doing laundry or cleaning the bathroom or going for a walk. Essentially doing all the things he could do instead of the one thing he had to do.
This is an incredibly interesting concept to me as I am a full-time writer at the moment. I don’t have another job, but when I sit down at my desk there seems to be one million other things for me to do. Writing doesn’t always feel like it’s the most important thing, so yes, I will do the laundry or clean the bathroom, or check my marketing or do anything except writing. It’s only when there’s a pressure of a deadline that I manage to get the writing done.
When I wrote my first book, I was going to school full-time and had a part-time job. I had a bunch of things I was doing, and yet I was able to write the book in about nine months, which is pretty timely in the grand scheme of things. My second book was about six months, the third was three, and then the fourth one took me almost a year to complete even though I had all the time in the world. It seems that the theory of busy-ness seems plausible.
My New Experiment
So what am I to do to make myself “busy?” Am I to get another job to fill up my time so that writing feels special?
Not yet. First I’m going to try to trick my brain in yet another way. I’ve picked up an index card system for managing my life, household chores, personal items, and business tasks. The thought is that each index card is a task and each recurring task is assigned daily, weekly, monthly, etc.. If it works, I’ll probably explain it more in another blog post. The aim is to make myself “busy” in other ways.
That means, I have to do all of the things on my index cards for the day before I am allowed to write. This is definitely going to be an experiment as we see if I can hack my brain. For instance, today I need to work on my newsletter, check on my freelance projects, work on one of those projects for an hour, do all the chores in the household index, etc.. Once those are finished, I can work on writing.
This may backfire, but that’s alright. It’s only a test. And besides, I’m the kind of person who likes to change up the way she does things at least every three months, if not more often. We’ll just have to see how this system fares after three months, and hopefully I’ll have another book written by then.
Do you have any tips and tricks for writing faster or staying focused? I’d love to read them.
(Author’s Note: I am aware of some of the controversial things surrounding NaNoWriMo as a company. This post is more about the concept of writing a book quickly, than the company itself. There are several different groups that use the same general concept, including one where you write 100,000 words in 100 days.)
