7 Things I Learned Drafting a Novel in 26 Days

85,000 words and many caffeinated drinks later

Last month I set out to draft a novel in 30 days. 

26 days later the draft was done, a solid 85,000 word first draft of a sci-fi novel that I’m (surprisingly) happy with. That’s about the same length as Crypto Confidential, for reference.

There’s quite a bit of work left to be done to get it ready to shop around, but this was an excellent experiment, I’m very happy I did it, and I learned quite a few things along the way. 

1: It’s Doable

When I started, I wasn’t sure if I could write 5,000 words per weekday, 1,250 words per weekend, and keep it up for three or four weeks. 

I’d never sustained more than 2,500 words per day so this was a massive jump in difficulty. Akin to only ever running five or six miles and then YOLOing a half marathon. But I pulled it off! And now that I know I can draft at this pace, I don’t have much of an excuse to not attempt something close to it in the future. 

I do feel, though, that 5,000 was a bit too much. Because lesson two was…

2: It’s Not Sustainable (Yet)

By the time I got to the end, I was drained. I needed to take a week off from writing entirely, and really from working much. It was so taxing of my mental and psychological energy that I needed a deep recovery afterwards, so if I had to get to 150,000 or 200,000 words at the same pace I don’t think I would have made it. 

But it did show me that there’s a higher ceiling on what’s sustainable than I previously thought. Continuing at 5,000 a day sounds, frankly, miserable. But 3,500 a day sounds quite easy now, as long as I have an outline. 

That’s quite motivating because two years ago when I started taking writing more seriously I struggled to do 1,500 - 2,000 a day. Then about a year ago I pushed to 2,500. If I can do 3,500 now, then maybe in a year or two 5,000 will feel as calm as 2,000 feels. 

I will run into time constraints eventually, I don’t think 10,000 a day would be sustainable simply because there aren’t enough hours to dedicate to writing. But 5,000 - 6,000 as a goal to build to doesn’t seem completely out of the question. 

3: Creative Endurance Can Be Trained Like Physical Endurance

I’m in awe of ultramarathoners who run 100-150 mile races, not because they can complete that long of a race, but because of their training schedule. 

Leading up to an ultramarathon they’ll often run 100+ miles a week, and even when they’re in their maintenance phase they might run 15 miles a day. 

Most people can’t run 15 miles, let alone a casual 15 a day. But with enough training, you probably could build up to that daily cadence. 

The same seems true with creative work. We have these limits in our head or cultural myths about only being able to do 3-4 hours of deep work, but what if that’s just the baseline most people reach, like thinking you can never run farther than a marathon? 

4: The Mental and Physical are Deeply Intertwined

One of the most surprising effects of pushing myself to do this much focused creative work was the physical toll. 

My skin got dry, my resting heart rate and HRV rose, I needed 9 hours of sleep many nights. It was clearly taking some physical toll on me, more than just the mental fatigue. 

The converse I think must be true, too. The better physical shape you’re in, the better and more sustainable mental work you can likely do. 

5: The Plan is Everything

There’s absolutely no way I could have done this without having a fairly detailed outline to start with. It ended up giving me a whole new appreciation for the benefits of a good outline. I think when I was writing at a more normal pace, it was easier to outline as I went and figure it out as I went, but that ended up creating some messes in my stories I had to go back and fix later, or long periods of feeling stuck. 

By having a relatively rigid outline I was sticking to I always knew what I was writing next which made it much easier to sustain the pace. And that only broke down when I reached the end of the book and realized I didn’t like the ending, and had to slow down to figure it out. 

I’ve always liked the more romantic notion of “figuring the book out as you go” but I think that might be a mistake. Even for someone who wants to be a “discovery” writer, forcing myself to make the outline made a big difference. 

Sanderson has a good quotation about this in one of his lectures where he says something like “Everyone is an outline writer, some people just need to write a draft to figure out their outline.” I think he’s right, and I feel much more committed to investing a lot of time in outlining now. 

6: Going Fast Forces Deeper Subconscious Focus

I was worried that by going this fast I wouldn’t have time for my subconscious to work things out in the downtime, which is often where the best ideas come from.

But the opposite ended up happening. By being so laser focused on this goal, there was hardly anything else for my subconscious to focus on. So all of the ideas and insights it was spitting out were draft related. It wasn’t distracted by other projects or even hobbies because there wasn’t space for anything else. The book was taking up all of my mindshare, so the ideas came faster, and were often better. 

I really could not have predicted this, but it was pretty cool to see. 

7: This is How I Want to Draft from Now On

Despite some of the downsides, this draft felt the best of the three first-drafts of books I’ve written now. 

Part of that is certainly from getting better from getting more reps in, but I do think the speed helped in ways I didn’t expect. 

And after the experience of having to throw out the last first draft, I think it’s better to try to get a good first draft down as fast as possible so you can get a sense of whether or not it’s worth investing more time in. 

If you can draft a book in a month, you could do three, four, six drafts in a year, pick the best one, finish that, and still publish one book a year. It’s given me some insight too into how authors like James Patterson could publish four books a year. Granted he has help, but, still, that seemed like an absolutely unbelievable pace until running this experiment. 

So while the process will need some tweaking, I really like this as a strategy. I plan to do it for the next nonfiction book I’m thinking about too. 

As for what’s next: I let the book sit last week, and will probably pick it back up this week. I’d like to get it to the point where I can give it to some trusted readers for feedback in the next two or three weeks, then get it ready to show my agent and potentially shop around by the end of the year. 

Onward!