What I Learned From Writing A 130K-Word Manuscript In 8 Months
Yep, you read that right — I FINISHED THE FREAKING DRAFT!!!!!!
One more time for the people in the back…
I FINISHED THE FRICK FRACKEN DRAFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
At about 10:30 PM Eastern Time this past Saturday, August 26th, after a 10-hour, 14,000-word writing marathon, I got to type the words, “END OF BOOK ONE.” And holy shirtballs did that feel good. The finished draft (aaaah) is sitting pretty at 131,109 words. Now, that’s not to say it’s ready to fire off to agents and publishers anytime soon — it definitely isn’t. But it’s DONE. And that’s a HUGE DEAL.
So, I thought I’d put together a quick list (are we sensing a theme here? Maggie Loves Lists™) of the lessons I’ve learned over the last 8 months. I’ve been a student in the Year-Long Novel Writing Project all year, which officially kicked off in February, but I started the project in January because I was excited about it (of course).
Here’s what I learned writing a 130,000-word manuscript in 8 months:
1. Keeping track of your progress is the ultimate motivator.
I created a massive spreadsheet to track my word count sometime in February. My instructor in YLWP provided a printable, simple version with weekly word totals and time spent and stuff like that, but I wanted to make it fancier (because of course I did) and created a color coded (of course) Google Sheet with a few more details.
Mine has a big bar across the top of the page with the current total word count and my monthly goal (and the percentage of which I’ve hit it). Recently, after joining a writing Discord, I added the “season” goal from that program, too.
Then, the sheet is broken down daily and weekly, tracking daily word count and minutes spent writing (I’m loosey-goosey on the second one), with the weekly totals tallied up in columns E-I. I also keep a running monthly word count in addition to the weeklies, and occasionally added notes to myself in the margins. I also adjusted part-way through so that my weeks start on Wednesdays and end on Tuesdays, since Tuesday is when I have class, and they have become my hardcore writing days (so it’s just nice to end the “week” with a bang).
Seeing all of this laid out in front of me helped me visualize how much progress I’d made, and a row of zeroes when I stopped writing for whatever reason made me cringe. I love having the math to turn to and see how much progress I’ve made.
2. Burnout is a killer.
Re: those strings of zeroes, burnout murdered me multiple times over the course of this project. There was a week and a half in May where I didn’t write because of horrid chaos at work (which resulted in me quitting that job, so, y’know). There’s also the two-week stretch (mostly planned) in August from attending Gen Con and then needing an entire week to recover because I got sick.
But the embarrassing one is what I want to talk about. There is an entire period from March 15th to April 10th where I didn’t write a single word. For a month. A MONTH!! When I knew I had this massive deadline breathing down my neck!!
Part of what happened there is I bit off more than I could chew, as I always do, but I also fell really heavily into the “Act 2 Slump,” which is a very real thing. (And maybe I’ll do a blog at some point about how I got out of that. The truth is, I don’t actually know? Lol.) And the more overwhelmed I got about not writing, the more I continued to Not Write, and it just turned into this vicious cycle where I was super embarrassed about it all the time.
But hey! It all worked out because I, uh, FINISHED THE DRAFT.
3. What works for everyone else might not work for you.
Okay, here’s one of the things that helped me get out of the Act 2 Slump: I changed my writing schedule. For most of the year I’ve been beating myself up about not writing every day, but the thing is, writing every day just doesn’t work for me. And realizing that — and more importantly, realizing it’s totally okay — helped me figure out what DOES work for me.
What I discovered: I am a marathoner, not a daily runner. I write best when I have large chunks of time to devote strictly to writing. However! Because I am also an adult who needs to work for a living, I obviously can’t do that every day. So, I turned Tuesdays into my only-writing day: writing and classwork and Nothing Else.
And here’s the thing, y’all… it worked!!! According to Peter, my YLWP instructor, the goal was to write between 3,000-4,000 words per week. When I was trying to write every day, I’d get so stressed out about squeezing in time to write that it would be torture to force out 150 words and call that good for the day. You do the math — 150 x 7 ain’t 3,000-4,000. (It’s 1,050, if you care, and no I didn’t have to use a calculator, why would you ask.)
BUT THEN! When I switched to writing marathons on Tuesdays, I regularly churned out 3,000+ in a single sitting. Just looking back at my Tuesdays I had 5,600-word day (Tuesday, July 25th), a 4,673-word day (Tuesday, August 22nd), and a couple of strictly insane marathon days, like a 12,307-word Tuesday (Tuesday, July 18th) when I was on my writer’s retreat.
Find what works for YOU, not what works for everyone else.
4. Internet rabbit holes are your friend, but they are extremely distracting.
Just a few Internet rabbit holes I fell down that made me laugh:
Do hermit crabs have skeletons?
How long does it take a whale to decompose in salt water?
Fun facts about thunderstorms
Atlantis myths (that I didn’t end up using but you bet did I have fun looking into them)
Volcanic eruption disasters, specifically in ancient times
How in the hell the tides actually work (TBH, I still don’t quite understand this)
The major technological export of Madagascar in the 1940s (it’s peanuts and peanut butter)
…How to grow peanuts and make peanut butter using 1940s technology
What’s hilarious is that for most of these, the result was maybe a sentence or two that made it into the manuscript. A couple of paragraphs, at most. They’re worthwhile and fun, but can be major time sucks. I think I spent like six hours on ancient volcanic eruptions and an embarrassing amount of time on the peanut butter thing… which will likely get cut out of the second draft. Whoops!
5. Scrivener is… actually pretty great.
I tried Scrivener once before either right before I started college or sometime during college on my dad’s recommendation, and it just absolutely did not do it for me. It felt clunky and difficult to use, and I just wanted a word processor. I don’t even remember what project that was for, but I do remember eventually abandoning said project because Scrivener was so overwhelming.
This time I tried it again, and it probably helps that this manuscript has so many moving pieces (scenes from “the Beforetimes,” about 5 years before the events of the book; journal entries I plan to use as chapter intros; random scenes I knew I wanted to write but didn’t know where to put them; etc. etc.). I was able to put all these bits and bobs into folders (one of which was called, hilariously, “Bits and Bobs”) instead of just like, dropping them at the end of a Word document the way I had been doing before. It got exhausting to keep track of all those different scraps of information.
I know I’m not using Scrivener to its full potential and I’m totally okay with that — I’m only using the bits that work for me and leaving the rest behind. My two complaints about Scrivener are one big one and one small one. The small one: I don’t like the way the “compile” feature farts out Word documents. It took me like a solid hour of reformatting the compiled draft (once it was FINISHED) into a print-ready document. (Print-ready for me, anyway.)
And my BIGGEST bone to pick with Scrivener: Why in the seven hells does it not have its own cloud storage?! The whole thing of having to obsessively back everything up to Dropbox — not Google Drive, and God help you if you try to use OneDrive — just to move the same darn document from one computer to another is SO annoying, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve opened my .scriv file on my desktop and panicked because 3,000+ words I wrote on my laptop just weren’t there. (Turns out they were still on my laptop and just needed some creative backing-up-and-syncing to get them to my desktop, but still. THE PANIC.)
6. Accountability buddies and writer friends are CRUCIAL.
I’ve talked a lot about my YLWP cohort, my writing Discords, and my friend Cypress, who has become a huge accountability partner and writing influence for me. I cannot stress the importance of a writing community enough. These people are AMAZING, and they’re always so excited for me when I report hitting another milestone or just, like, actually enjoying what I’m writing on one day or another.
They’ve been here for me this whole time, and have done wonders for making me want to show up to the page again and again. Find your people. Force them to be your friends. Talk about bread. Life will be better that way.
7. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be done.
And finally, the most important lesson of all. I didn’t used to be, but I’m a big believer in “that’s a problem for the second draft.” If you KNOW you’re writing something historically or politically or culturally inaccurate, just write it. Don’t fall so far down the Internet rabbit hole chasing factoids that you stop writing.
The reason my first draft isn’t readable yet is because there are missing scenes, [notes I left in brackets for things I need to change or I know aren’t working], literally just times where I wrote out “okay I’m just skipping this for now but SOMEHOW…”, and endlessly repetitive actions and dialogue tags that I used fifty thousand times throughout and will now need to search and destroy.
But like — it’s done. I FINISHED IT.
I wrote 130,000 words in 8 months!!!!
Seriously, it’s the best feeling in the world. I’m taking a two-week break from writing but I’ll be back on September 11th to start fresh. I’m waiting on ($80 worth of) printing supplies to arrive tomorrow, and then I’ll be printing out the entire draft to shove it in a 3-ring binder and rip it to shreds during my next writers’ retreat (9/11-9/15, I’m so pumped).
Soon, I’ll start writing about the editing process — which, honestly, is like my favorite part of the writing process. The puzzle pieces are THERE now, and now you get to play around until they fit.
Til next time,
Mags