Welcome back to indie books. Before I go on I have to give a link and hat tip. A lot of my first ideas and current stats on book publishing come from a site called No Media Kings.
It has a slightly different ideology to this site. Jim worked in publishing and noticed that if you are not a million selling super star author but one of the majority then it's better to self publish. Financially.
Anyway, on to my novel. So, the first draft.
Everyone thinks of good ideas. Everyone. It's quite easy to think of a story or premise and even flesh it out a bit in your mind. We all have a take on the vampire genre after we watched whatever vampire movie, for example. It doesn't take too much effort to list some chapter headings or scene ideas either. I find reading around a topic or researching fun too. What's even better is editing and playing with a story.
Alas, there's an annoying hard work part in the middle - the first time you have to sit down and write the whole thing out in long form.
This is tough, every page you manage to write you want to be perfect or you change your mind about, you have to just suck it up and keep going no matter how much you want to edit and play but it's so hard. You get writer's block, you get distracted, you give up or forget about it. But have no fear, the way through is to have some awareness of the numbers before you go in.
Now - a novel can be any length or form you like and I'm all for breaking the mould. All I'm doing next is giving an example to start from so go easy.
First question, how long is a novel?
Well a novella can be quite short and a Stephen King epic can be very long - but let's start here: a 250 page novel has 100 000 words.
That could be 20 chapters of about 5000 words each.
So, how long is that going to take you? Well you've got your story broken up into 20 scenes and all your notes are there and off you go. But how many words can you write in a day. I'm assuming you are not a full time writer. What about a page of MS Word ... lets try 600 words.
Let's do the maths. 100 000 words divided by 600 equals 166. That's 166 days.
But wait a moment, will you write everyday? What about the weekend? What if you are busy or too tired after work one day. On this project, I'm happy if I write on 4 days out of the week. So how do we work that out? For every 4 days of writing there are 3 days of rest. Hmmmnnn.
166 days has 41.5 blocks of 4. So we need to add 41.5 blocks of 3 to the total number of days, right? That's another 124.5 days. So, at our rate of work we will get the first draft done in ... 290 days. Or coming on for 10 months! Blimey.
So, if you say, write two pages of Word a session and write on 5 days a week you could get that down to around 4 months maybe.
So let's sort this out, for us part time writers:
Thinking 500 words a day is a reasonable start = not gonna make it
Writing less than 1000 words in a session = gonna take a while
Writing 1500-2000 a session = getting sh*t done
By the way, nothing wrong with going slow. But as an inexperienced long form writer you are severely upping your chance of giving up before the end.
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