Jennifer Willis

A number of years ago, when I was working full-time for a communications company and trying to make time to write a novel, Stephen Hawley Martin told me that if I got up an hour early every day to write a page of my story, in a year I’d have a first draft.

A year?

As much as I wanted to write fiction, who wants to spend an entire year working on a first draft — something that will then have to be rewritten a few times, edited, revised? And so I put off writing fiction.

It’s tough to carve time out of a busy, full-time work schedule to sit down and write fiction — it’s even worse when you’re already writing for a living, and the last thing you want to do is spend even more time in front of the computer stringing words together.

I imagine this was part of the impetus pushing Chris Baty and friends to invent National Novel Writing Month in 1999 — an insane effort to write a 50,000-word first draft in 30 days. In the twelve years since, NaNoWriMo has become an international event that takes place every November, challenging new and experienced writers around the world to write an average of 1,667 words each day. If you make it to the end, you have the first draft of a novel, ready to be picked apart for rewriting.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo every year since 2004, and it works for me. I like the competitive spirit, the cooperation and support found on the online forums, and the fact that I’m committed to a new fiction project. One of these manuscripts — my 2008 NaNoWriMo project — has recently been released as an ebook, with two more to follow this summer.

But what if you don’t want to wait until November to start your project? Or what if you can’t necessarily commit to writing every day — or nearly every day — for an entire month?

Don’t Do What I Did

First off, don’t do what I did when I wrote my first novel. Between 1999 and 2001, I wrote snippets here and there, sitting at airport gates waiting for my plane or late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t have a structure for my writing time, and I hadn’t given myself a hard deadline either. The process went on, and on, and on. Looking back, it seems a miracle that thing ever got finished.

Treat your fiction project like you would any writing assignment. Map out what needs to get done with an estimate of how long each step takes. What’s your target word count? Look at books or short stories in your genre to get a feel for how long your project should be. How many words can you write in an hour? What time can you block off — consistently — for writing, and what dedicated space can you use?

From there, set a challenging but realistic deadline — and find a way to hold yourself accountable. When you don’t have an editor breathing down your neck for your story that was due two days ago, motivation can be on the slim side. Setting up rewards for yourself — like a spa day — for meeting your deadline can be a great incentive, but sometimes you need more of a stick than a carrot. One trick Baty suggests is to make a check out to a friend for all the money you have, and post-date it for the day after your deadline. At the start of your project, give the check to your friend — with instructions to cash it if you miss the mark.

How to Create a Fiction Writing Schedule

For example, if you want to write a 7,500-word science fiction short story, and you write an average of 1,200 words per hour, you’re looking at 6.25 hours for your first draft. Also factor in research time, but don’t let yourself go overboard. One rule of thumb I’ve learned for first drafts of fiction is if you do a Google search and you can’t find what you’re looking for within three-to-five mouse clicks, leave a placeholder for the information and come back to it in the rewrite.

Let’s assume you want to spend 3.75 hours on research, giving us a nice round figure of 10 hours for your short story project. Now grab your calendar and figure out where those 10 hours are going to come from. If you’ve got every Wednesday night free — great! Block out two hours every Wednesday night for five weeks, and there’s your project time.

If you only make vague plans to “Do some writing this weekend” after all the errands are run, or wait to start writing until you “feel inspired,” you know you’re never going to do it, right?

Whatever time you can schedule, make it as consistent as you can, so you’ll get into a rhythm with your writing. And keep this time sacred, just as you wouldn’t let hell or high water keep you from a meeting with an editor from one of your dream markets. It’s way too easy to let life start to slide into your fiction time, but if you treat it like it’s any other work commitment, you’re more likely to get your project done on time.

In the end, regardless of special strategies and neat tips and tricks, it comes down to just making yourself do it. No matter how much you want to write your novel or short story, you’ll still likely find yourself procrastinating and coming up with every excuse in the book not to do it — which reminds me … when your writing time comes around, make sure you turn of the television or radio, close the door, or otherwise eliminate what is likely to distract you from your work. But just as Sting acknowledged that you have to treat songwriting as job and simply make yourself do it, the only way your fiction is going to get done is if you sit yourself down and write.

While I’m shamelessly plugging my work, here’s my latest “Job of the Week” profile for Conde Nast Portfolio.com, on the Miami Heat’s new head coach Erik Spoelstra.