Over the summer I blogged about making a writing schedule and designed one in Excel that set aside 14 hours a week for writing. At the time, a lot of you wrote in the comments section that this was an impressive, amazing, unbelievable goal, but I didn’t heed your warnings. I kept looking at the Excel sheet and thinking, but it fits. I have four hours of free time every day after work. If I just cut out TV time and doing the dishes a few times a week…
In reality, it ended up being an ideal writing schedule, not a practical one. I dreamed of regularly waking up at 6:00 am to write for an hour or two (yeah right), didn’t take into account all the hours of research I still needed to do for my Byberry book, which cut into fiction writing time, and I didn’t allow room or flexibility for anything to go wrong (for example, I wanted to write on my lunch break every day, but a lot of lunch breaks I ended up needing to call repair men, schedule doctors appointments, etc.). I’m not saying writing 14 hours a week is impossible (though it definitely was for me at the time last year), but the schedule didn’t fit into my real life schedule, so it didn’t work for me.
To create a more practical and realistic–but still challenging–writing schedule, I decided to do some research on myself and my habits, so I could create a more catered-to-me plan. The reason I was really inspired to do this was that 2013 Business Plan I mentioned before. The first week of January, I set end-week word goals for myself, but I’ve been consistently behind schedule. I wasn’t really expecting too much of myself, I thought–just 5,000 words a week–but still I wasn’t meeting that quota. And it was so frustrating, because I wanted to finish my WIP so I could rewrite the first draft and actually have a finished manuscript I could be proud of. One that I could share with my critique partners and get that pins and needles feeling you get when someone is reading your book and you need them to finish and then fangirl with you over it. I’m dying to stop thinking of myself as a writer in theory and actually be a writer in practice.
To do this, I started keeping track of when I was naturally putting my butt in the chair, for how many hours, and how many words were produced in each session. From this, I was hoping to develop a routine.
So that’s what I’ve done for the past three months.
Week 1 (January 14-January 20):
Total Writing Time: 2.5 hours
Total Weeks Word Count: 2,550
Week 2 (January 21-January 27, aka the week of archive research for Byberry):
Total Hours Spent Writing: 0
Total Week’s Word Count: 0
Week 3 (January 28-February 3):
Total Writing Time: 3 hours
Total Week’s Word Count: 3,352
Week 4 (February 4-February 10):
Total Writing Time: 3.5 hours
Total Week’s Word Count: 7,851
Week 5 (February 11-February 17, aka the week of the Death Cold):
Total Writing Time: 0
Total Week’s Word Count: 0
Week 6 (February 18-February 24):
Total Writing Time: 0.5 hours
Total Week’s Word Count: 1,071
Week 7 (February 25-March 3):
Total Writing Time: 2 hours
Total Week’s Word Count: 4,000
Week 8 (March 4-March 10):
Total Writing Time: 3.5 hours
Total Week’s Word Count: 4,389
Week 9 (March 11-March 17):
Total Writing Time: 3 hours
Total Week’s Word Count: 4,237
Week 10 (March 18-present):
Total Writing Time: 4 hours
Total Week’s Word Count: 6,413
TOTAL WRITING TIME (3 Months): 22 hours
TOTAL WORD COUNT (3 Months): 33,863
I was averaging about three hours of writing time a week, with about four thousand words a week. Not a stellar writing schedule, but it was consistent enough that the WIP was steadily growing, little by little. (For the revision process, which is more about time than word count, I’d like to boost it to a regular 5-6 hours of writing a week. We’ll see how that goes.)
I found that just keeping myself accountable, by writing down how much time I was actually dedicating to writing, and how many words I was producing, it helped me stay on track. It kept me from wandering off for a week or two at a time, distracted by other activities.
I’m happy to announce that as of midnight last night, I have a 54,000 word complete manuscript! All total, it probably took about four and a half months to write. It’s YA, post-apocalyptic, set in an abandoned hospital, and plague-ridden. It’s a mess of a first draft and needs a lot of work. But it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has characters that are really taking form and who I like. I’m so excited about it! It’s taking all my willpower not to tear into a revision right now, but I’m going to let it sit and simmer for exactly two weeks, so I can get some distance before rereading it and evaluating all its shortcomings.
Until that time, I can just admire how pretty and shiny and hefty the manuscript is on my hard drive. :]
Hannah Karena Jones 
Congrats! it’s an accomplishment just to get the book down. Go celebrate.
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Thanks! I did go celebrate…with free Rita’s water ice! Happy first day of Spring!!
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good for you! I’ve been disappointed in how I’ve let my writing go since having children. Blogging and corporate communications are “writing,” of course, but I miss my dedicated time for creative writing. Maybe this summer will be my triumphant return!
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I hope the summer is indeed your triumphant return! It’s getting warm already…Good luck!
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I’ve been trying to stick to a writing schedule for so long, but school work keeps getting in the way. Even when I’m on vacation, I spend most of my time working at the movie theater. But I keep my notebook on me all the time. I spend the majority of my classes writing scene outlines or developing characters, and I always write during the slow hours at the theater. Maybe I’ll be able to figure out a pattern like you did and set some end of week goals. I might even make some progress!
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Ah school. I barely wrote creatively in college–except when it was required, and therefore the time was already carved out, for a creative writing class–and I was always so mentally and creatively burned out during breaks that it hardly happened then either. I found, actually, that it took about a year after I graduated to really start writing creatively again. This is partly because of burn out, I believe, partly an intense need at the time for stability before I could write (a full time job, a place to live), and also because I just needed to recharge/absorb creativity: I hadn’t read any fiction books for my own pleasure in FOREVER! Now that I’ve spent almost two years reading like a fiend, I’m so ready to produce some of my own work!
It’s crazy that I’m only just now starting to feel caught up.
Those writers, like Veronica Roth, who were able to write such amazing works while also being full-time college students amaze me. I regret that college “put off” my writing career and goals for 4+ years–especially because, on paper, I had so much more free time then than I have now. Whole summers I could have spent writing! Alas…–but writing full-time and school full-time was never a balance I could get the hang of.
I hope you’re able to get a writing schedule up and running this summer! Crossing my fingers for your writing progress, and some fleshed out scenes based off those awesome outline notes!!!
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