The 30-Day Novel Challenge: Draft a Book in a Month

50,000 words in 30 days is 1,667 words a day. That number is the entire challenge. It is not the hard part.

The hard part is day 17, when the novelty has gone, the end is not close, you are 4,000 words behind. Every plan I have seen budgets for the writing and not for that. So this one is built around week three.

The numbers

Take a rest day. Six writing days at 1,924 beats seven at 1,667, because the seventh day is where people break the streak and then quit entirely. A planned day off is not a missed day.

That last point is the whole reason I put the six-day row in. Streak psychology is real and it cuts both ways.

The four weeks

Week one, days 1 to 7. Establishing. You will overshoot. Everyone does. It is the single most common cause of failure in week three, because you set a pace you cannot hold and then feel behind at a normal speed. Write your target, stop, do something else.

End each day mid-sentence. Hemingway's trick and the only advice here I have never regretted taking. Starting is expensive. This way tomorrow continues rather than starts.

Week two, days 8 to 14. The work. Novelty is gone, the end is not visible. This is the stretch where writing becomes a job, which is normal and not a sign of anything.

Two rules that matter more than anything else this week:

• Never reread from the top. Two pages back, maximum. Rereading from chapter one is how a 30-day draft becomes a 90-day one.

• Bracket instead of solving. [FIX: how does she know about the car?] is a perfectly good sentence in a first draft. I finished mine with about forty of them.

Week three, days 15 to 21. Where it is decided. You are probably behind. The book is probably worse than you hoped. Both are expected and neither predicts anything about the finished novel.

What actually works here:

• Write out of order. Skip to a scene you want to write. Films are shot out of order as standard practice. Stitching later is a real technique rather than a shortcut.

• Shrink the unit. "Write chapter fourteen" is a job. "Write the ninety seconds where he does not answer" is something a person can do before work.

• Cut the target, not the habit. Dropping to 1,000 a day and continuing beats holding 1,667 and stopping. The streak is the asset.

When opening the file is itself the obstacle, a free tool that deletes your words if you stop typing breaks the standoff. Fifteen minutes, no backspace. Most of what comes out is unusable, which is not the point. The point is that the file is open.

Week four, days 22 to 30. Landing it. Write the last scene now, out of order, even if you are nowhere near it. Once the ending exists you are connecting two points rather than protecting a perfect imaginary version, which is a much smaller and more boring job. Boring is what you want here.

Finish thin. Dialogue, blocking, brackets. Description can wait.

Preparation that is worth the day

Spend one day before you start on exactly three things. Not more, because preparation is the most comfortable way to not write.

1. A one-line premise. What the book is about, not what happens.

2. Three to five characters, each with what they want and what they hide.

3. A list of scenes you are excited to write. Not an outline. A list. In week three this becomes the thing that saves you, because you can go and write one.

If you want a fuller outline, do it properly rather than in an afternoon. Otherwise a scene list plus drafting from it will get you through more days than a detailed plan you abandon on day nine.

Keeping the premise, characters and rules somewhere checked against every chapter saves you the specific week-three failure of forgetting what you established on day four.

What to accept before you start

It will be bad. That is what a first draft is. The month produces raw material, not a book.

You will hate it around day 20. Nearly universal. It is a timestamp on where you are, not a verdict on the work.

50,000 words is not a novel in most genres. It is most of a short one, or half of a standard adult novel. Finishing the challenge means finishing the challenge.

Revision takes longer than drafting. Months, usually. The 30 days buy you something to revise, which is the thing you could not previously get.

If you fall behind

You will. The question is only what you do about it.

• One or two days behind: ignore it. Write today's target.

• A week behind: lower the daily target. Do not attempt to catch up in one weekend, which fails and then ends the attempt.

• Two weeks behind: change the goal to finishing the draft rather than finishing in November. The deadline was always arbitrary. The draft is not.

Quitting on day 19 with 20,000 words is still 20,000 words you did not have. That is not failure, it is a shorter version of the same win.