Writing A Page A Day Can Lead To A Finished Book By The End Of A Year.
Art For Art's Sake: Vol 2 Part 3
In my previous essay on this topic, I shared how starting small in our writing life works wonders. Let's do a brief recap.
It builds your writing habit.
It builds your writing muscles.
It makes you practice and fine-tune your craft.
You get immediate feedback on what's working and what's not.
You start believing in yourself when you say you're a writer.
Now the question arises, how do we go about starting small?
Step 1: Figure out your writing output.
Even before you figure out what you're going to write or how you will go about it, it's better to figure out how much you will be able to write in a given day.
Sit down with your calendar. Mark out everything, tasks, errands, meetings, responsibilities, birthdays, weekends, (ladies - your menstrual cycle) - anything and everything you know will happen in the week and month.
This will leave you with the actual number of days you could use for your writing.
Next, sit with your daily planner. Mark out all the hours of the day you have some personal, professional and miscellaneous commitments. Don't forget to include time for personal hygiene, meals, family and friends time, and me time.
This will leave you with the actual number of hours you have in the day that you could possibly use for writing.
Next, figure out how much you can write in one day. If you're a novice writer, go for a page a day. That'll be low and challenging enough for you. You could also go for how much time you can spend on writing. For me, 2 hours a day, 3-4 days a week, is the minimum I can pull off, so this becomes my baseline. Be it word count or time spent writing, figure out your minimum daily writing output.
Step 2: Figure out your production goal.
With the results of step 1, you can now figure out your production goal.
Let's say, in the case of writing the first draft of your novel, you figure out you can write during the weekends and end up with 500 words per day for your 50k word count novel. This means it'll take you 100 days to finish the draft. Based on today's date (17th May 2023), you can hope to finish your first draft by 28th April 2024.
Let's say, in the case of writing a week's worth of online articles, you can write an hour a day, and it takes you two days to end up with an article. This means that to have 7 articles written, you need 14 days.
Figuring out steps one and two helps you get a realistic picture of your writing process.
Step 3: Take a small bite at it.
Writing the first draft of your novel or writing a week's worth of online articles can feel overwhelming. So make it less overwhelming by tackling it a small bite at a time.
Instead of worrying about the whole novel and the potential deadline, when you write your book, focus only on the scene at hand.
Instead of worrying about all the articles, concentrate on writing the best article you have right now.
Be present with the task you have in hand. Going ahead of yourself will do nothing except stress you out. Enjoy what you're writing in that moment, and it'll fly by smoothly. Then you can work on the next small bite.
Step 4: Cross the finish line.
At first, writing just a page day or a couple of hours a day may not look very promising or productive. But if you keep at it, you'll start to solidify yourself as a writer. You will gain self-confidence and self-motivation to keep going. And then the one-page-a-day will compound into a finished book.
