30-Day First Draft: Week 1 Report & Lessons

29,588 Words Later

Last Monday, I started my attempt to write a first draft of a sci-fi novel in 30 days.

Since then, I’ve written 29,588 words, well on my way to my rough target of 120,000.

I wanted to share a quick update with some lessons learned so far. I’m going to keep this brief and punchy since I’ve already done my 5,000 for today, too, and I’m a little tired.

Pacing is Everything: I think I’d burn out if I tried to sit down and grind out 5,000 words in one go. It’s too much.

Breaking the day into three writing sessions was a good plan, but I’ve had even better luck splitting it into 4. It usually goes something like this now:

6:00 AM: First session, ~1,000 words
9:30 AM: Second session, ~2,000 words
12:00 PM: Third session, ~1,000 words
2:00 PM: Fourth session, ~1,000 words

In between each session I try to find some way to disconnect and take my mind off of it so I can come back to it refreshed.

All Rest Is Not Created Equal: I’ve done a variety of things while on my breaks. Looking at my phone and scrolling Twitter does not seem to refresh me very much.

Using one of Jonny Miller’s NSDRs, working out, going for a walk, having a snack and watching something on YouTube, they all work much better.

Good Outlining is Essential: The reason I’ve been able to maintain this pace so far is having a very strong outline of where things are going. Taking 10-15 minutes to plan everything out for the next day or two saves hours of wondering as I’m going.

I think they must be different parts of the thinking process because I find it very hard to plan the next steps while in writing mode. Sometimes they appear, but sometimes they don’t, and when I don’t have clear next beats, the story is really hard to get out.

The time I’m carving out to plan is really paying dividends here, and gives me a deeper appreciation for trying to plan as much of the novel as possible before getting started.

6,000 Might be Possible: I set my daily target at 5,000 words, and last Thursday, I went for 6,000.

It was definitely harder, but not impossible, and I suspect that with enough training I could get to that point during one of these sprints.

Beyond that… I don’t know. Is 10,000 a day possible? Maybe? One thing at a time.

I Was Wasting a Lot of Time Before: I don’t know if I want to sustain this kind of creative pace indefinitely, but there’s a happy medium between this and what I was doing before.

The time pressure of getting this many words in per day is forcing me to be much more efficient with everything else, and it’s been a noticeable boost to my overall productivity. I might not have been putting enough on my plate beforehand.

Write Through The Bad Days: I was feeling pretty down on the book Friday, and started questioning if I should even be doing this.

But instead of stepping away from it, I just pushed through that section, kept going over the weekend, and felt much better today (Monday).

I’ve found that those parts are natural in the writing process, especially for these long projects. You just have to write through them, get something down, and you can always go back and edit it later. In fact, you’ll have to edit it later either way! And it’s often not as bad as you think it is.

The Morning Session is a Cheat Code: By far the biggest difference between my “good” and “bad” days is whether or not I got a good morning session in.

I have to sear this into my brain because most mornings I really don’t want to get up at 5:30, but when I do, I feel so much better, both energetically and emotionally, so it’s worth getting out of bed for.

I need to print this and put it on my wall by my bed or something. Those first few moments when the alarm go off are crucial.

Eat Breakfast! The last thing I noticed was that I felt much worse on the days where I didn’t eat breakfast. It feels silly to say, but focused creative work does require a lot of energy, and if you aren’t fueled for it, you’ll struggle.

So even if it delays my start time, I have to make sure to eat, at least before diving in to the second session.

All in all though, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by how this is going. I’m sure there will be some other challenges along the way, but I’m off to a strong start. Make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already so you get next week’s update.

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