This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
No, I haven’t gone mad. I know that you’re not supposed to be able to write a novel in ten days, but I’ve got myself in a tricky predicament: I have to write a new novel, and I have to do it quickly. So I’ve got ten days off work, I’ve almost cleared my social schedule and that means there’s nothing to get in the way of me and my laptop.I guess you’re probably wondering why an earth I need to write a novel so quickly. Well, I’m on the RNA New Writers' Scheme, and I have to submit my manuscript for critiquing by August. Which was fine when I had a manuscript to submit, only I recently decided that I didn’t want to submit that one and I’m going to put it on Amazon instead.
Which left me with a dilemma, did I resurrect an old half finished novel, dig out my very first manuscript, or write a new one? The easiest answer would have been to dust off my first manuscript and send that in. But what would be the benefit? My writing, in my opinion, has come on leaps and bounds since then, and to get it to that standard I’d probably need to do a whole new rewrite. The half finished novels were out of the question too – they are half finished for a very good reason!
That meant the only option left was to write a new one. About 6 weeks ago I came up with a cracking idea for a novel. One that consumed me for days until I started to write it. On the first day I wrote 5,000 words. It was one of those stories that flowed naturally to me, it had legs.
Faced with needing something new written before August, I booked ten days off work. I’m hoping to write at least 7,500k words a day (In my maths it’s 80,000 minus 5,000 already written, then 75,000 divided by ten). Easy peasy…right?
The first day got off to an iffy start. I still had to research a few bits for the novel and I re-edited some of the 5,000 words to get my head into it, and there was the added complication of the beautiful weather outside. Word count by day 1: 6,800. The second day got off to a much better start, I had walked the dog, breakfasted and got to my desk with a giant cup of coffee by 8.30am. And as of 9.45pm tonight my word count is: 15,052. (Don’t worry I wasn’t there all day, there were many, many, breaks in between).
The question is will I be able to sustain my writing frenzy, or will I hit the 20 thousand word hump that gets me every time? I’ll let you know next week how I get on, or if you follow me on twitter @annabell_writes, I’ll post my daily word counts!