The 30-Day First Draft Challenge

Can I Finish a Novel First Draft in a Month?

One thing I’ve learned from drafting a couple books now is how important and unimportant the first draft is.

I spent about five months on the first draft of Crypto Confidential. But then I immediately deleted ~40% of it and extensively rewrote the rest of it. Almost none of that first draft survived to the final.

Before writing Crypto Confidential I thought the first draft was the most important step of the process. I assumed that once you had a first draft, you simply tweaked it to get it to the finish line. Now I realize it’s the opposite. The first draft is just the starting point. The real work happens in the rewriting, expanding, deleting, refining, and your willingness to continue editing and improving it makes the biggest difference between a good book and a great book. Obviously the first draft is essential, but you also can’t take it too seriously.

Part of why you can’t take the first draft too seriously, especially in fiction, is that sometimes you get to the end and realize you shouldn’t be writing that book at all. Editing a first draft that should be discarded is perhaps the biggest way to waste time as a writer. And while you can do a decent amount of selection before you write out the first draft, sometimes you need to get a draft done before you know if it’s worth refining or not.

I did the first draft of the sci-fi novel in about two months, and the second draft in six weeks. I found that sprinting through them helped keep everything connected in my head better, and provided a fire under my ass to not get too hung up on tweaking things as I went.

Now that I’m starting over with the sci-fi novel I want to see how quickly I can get the first draft done without having a serious hit to the quality of the writing. So inspired by Madi Taskett’s similar challenge for herself, I’m going to write a first draft of the new sci-fi novel in 30 days.

It’s an aggressive timeline but I think it’s doable.

By starting today, August 19th, I have 22 weekdays and 8 weekend days. I’ll aim for 5,000 words per weekday, plus 1,250 words per weekend day, to be able to reach 120,000 words within 30 days.

120,000 words is a good target for a first draft, assuming I’ll cut it down to anywhere from 75,000-100,000 by the end, which is a typical length for a first novel. I might not need to go all the way to 120,000 words to finish the draft though, so I’ll give myself an acceptable minimum of 80,000 words.

My normal writing pace is about 1,000 words per hour, which would suggest I need five writing hours per day. But I don’t know if I can sustain that for five hours per day, the most I’ve done is three or four, so let’s say I need to allocate six hours per day for writing in case I slow down.

I think the best strategy will be to break the day into four writing chunks:

06:00 - 07:00: 1,000 words
09:30 - 11:30: 2,000 words
01:00 - 03:00: 2,000 words
03:30 - 04:30: Whatever remains

Between the first and second sessions I’ll be getting the kids breakfast and off to school, and between the second and third I’ll go to the gym and eat lunch. If I need the fourth session, I can do a NSDR or meditation to recover during the thirty minute break. Those interruptions should all provide enough downtime to let me return to the writing fresh, but we’ll see if I need to adjust.

The last piece I’ll add to the routine is a 15-20 minute planning session in the evening before bed. I can use that time to adjust the outline and draft the beats of the scenes I’m going to write the next day, which will let me move through the drafting quicker by not needing to come up with what’s going to happen as I’m going.

I won’t use AI for writing any of the book, but I will use it as a sounding board for brainstorming. It’s much better at that anyway.

As for pre-work, I haven’t written any of this new draft yet, but I do have the advantage of already knowing what the world looks like from my previous draft, and I’ve put together a rough outline, about 60 scenes, which is more than enough to get started.

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I’ll also provide daily updates on Twitter / Instagram, and of course share my writing sessions on Prolific.

Wish me luck 🫡