Writing is a game of numbers
Much can be said about writing a book. Much has. Even more can be written about writing a book, while not writing said book.
Divine inspiration keeps popping up as the key ingredient of success, but waiting for it is, in fact, the key facilitator of divine procrastination. Rely on inspiration if you plan to never finish anything, yet continue to enjoy the cheap thrill of thinking yourself an author.
Established writers know this. They know they have to show up every day and spend a certain number of hours in front of a slow-filling page, resulting in a certain minimum daily word count. They’ve long shed the misconception about writing as this wonderfully bohemian activity guided by a capricious muse’s whims, and know it’s more often than not a total tedium.
Established writers know, and harness, the magic of accrual.
I used to tell interviewers that I wrote every day except for Christmas, the Fourth of July, and my birthday. That was a lie. I told them that because if you agree to an interview you have to say something, and it plays better if it’s something at least half-clever. Also, I didn’t want to sound like a workaholic dweeb (just a workaholic, I guess). The truth is that when I’m writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday (at my age you try to ignore your goddamn birthday anyway).
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Spend an hour writing a thousand words every day. Even if you skip weekends, that’ll give you about 20,000 words a month. Give it four months, and you have an 80,000-word first draft to show for it.
The old timers had to count words in their mind, or simply rely on the habit. Us moderns can’t be bothered with either. Too often we label ourselves “writers,” perform all the relevant personal and social rituals, and whine about not having finished that mythical novel that would surely rank us among our illustrious predecessors, once published.
We don’t even have to perform mental word counts any more, computers do it for us. Our part, it seems, is to just ignore all that, and keep entertaining our delusions of authorship. When you’re not tracking your writing habits, it’s easy to enjoy the fine sentiment of having done your part, while you’re doing nothing of significance towards finishing that book. Simply continue to marinate in the sauce of modern digital stimulation, without a way out, without any alarms sounding off when you’re lost.
If you’re serious about writing your book, then get serious about writing it. How’s that for a koan? It’s time to admit that as esoteric a form of art writing may be, it’s also a game of numbers. It sounds silly: If you don’t write, you’re not writing. Yet here we are.
To finish your book before you die of old age (if you’re lucky to survive that long), you must:
Set a deadline for your book
How can you finish anything, when you don’t plan to finish it?
In that case, “finishing” is synonymous with “abandoning.” You’ll never finish your work, you’ll just abandon it surreptitiously, and pretend it’s the normal thing to do, like people throwing newborn kittens over the neighbor's fence.
A deadline means you’re planning to finish. Missing it means failure, not the sort of neutral “success” that’s supposed to be some sort of stepping stone for the greater things you’ll surely achieve in some reassuringly distant future.
Set a deadline and strive for it. Without a deadline, it’s probably best not to start at all.
Try another, open-ended hobby.
Set a target word count
How can you finish anything, when you don’t know what “finished” means?
Here’s an acceptable definition: A book is finished when you've got nothing more to add to it. Take that one step further, and let’s say that a book is finished when it’s perfect. That’s a fine definition of “finished.” It’s also an excellent cop-out.
You’ll always have more to add, and your book will never be perfect, so it won’t ever be finished. You can still call yourself a writer, in the meanwhile—you are, technically, writing with no end in sight. Come to think about it, why bother finishing that blasted book at all, since it’ll never be done, and you still bear the title of “writer” regardless.
Let’s get back to Earth, shall we, and define a “finished” book as having a certain size, measured in words—its word count.
You set out to write a novel? Good. Start writing and don’t stop until you’ve hit 90,000 words. Now go back and start trimming the fat. This will still probably get you above 70,000 words, which is the somewhat arbitrary size of a standard-form novel.
Congratulations, thanks to defining “finished” based on a measurable parameter (the word count), you now recognize what finished is, and therefore you’ll know it when you see it.
Supercharge your process
Having set a deadline and a target word count for your next masterpiece, you’re faced with two options: the familiar one, which is to pat yourself on the back for this achievement, fold it, and walk away; or to start working.
Now the latter is the bit you may not necessarily enjoy, but there are ways to ease yourself into it, by surrounding yourself with the tools and processes designed to facilitate that.
Ideally, you’d have everything set up:
a decent computer (you don’t need a gaming beast to write text)
a nice text editor
a sane way to organize your writing
an easy process for saving and backing-up your work, for peace of mind
On top of that, you would set goals. Smaller, manageable goals, to support the overarching goal of writing 90,000 words. We all need small victories and that periodical reassurance of “task completion” to keep us going.
So set daily, monthly, yearly, and even hourly goals for:
the number of words you should write in an hour, day, week, month, or year
the number of hours you should spend writing each day (and week, month, or year)
Don’t just set these, follow-up on them, otherwise you just wasted time with the busywork of organizing the writing that you don’t do. Check to see if you’re actually achieving these goals, and how you fare on the bigger picture—the writing of your master oeuvre.
There’s no greater thrill than seeing how your work takes shape, measurably. It’s a self-reinforcing loop: the more you write, the more goals you’ll attain, and the more you’ll be energized to keep writing.
And then?
And then, having followed this recipe, you’d have finally written your book, for better or worse.
The only remaining question is how easy or difficult this whole goal tracking business will be for you.
Novelitist was purpose-built from the ground up to take care of the above (and much more), thus unburdening you from it, freeing you to actually do your job: write, and write more. Be a clever writer of your time, and take full advantage of modernity.
Alternatively, use other means to track your writing progress: other apps, pen and paper, anything, but make sure you do it.
Because, as prosaic (sic!) and unglamorous it may sound, writing a book is a game of numbers: no numbers, no book.