How to write a novel in a month

Every November a few hundred thousand people try to write fifty thousand words in thirty days, and the ones who finish are not the fastest typists or the people with the most free time. They are the ones who did a little arithmetic, prepared for a week, showed up for an hour a day and kept going when the plan broke. You can do it in any month. Here is how.

What a month gets you

Fifty thousand words is a short novel or two thirds of a long one, and in either case it is a first draft: the version where you find out what the book is. It will have flat scenes, a character whose name changes in chapter nine and a middle that sags. That is what first drafts are, and the month is worth doing because a finished bad draft can be revised and an unfinished good one cannot. Decide now that nobody reads it on day thirty-one, and most of the fear goes out of the thing.

If your book is a ninety-thousand-word epic, the month is still useful: set the target at fifty thousand, reach the midpoint, and keep the habit when the month ends. The habit is the real prize.

The arithmetic, done once

Fifty thousand words over thirty days is 1,667 a day, which is the number everyone quotes and almost nobody can hold, because a month has a birthday, a cold and a weekend away in it. Plan on twenty-five writing days instead: 2,000 words on the days you write, and five days you are allowed to miss without falling behind. If 2,000 is out of reach at your speed, take 1,700 and accept that one missed day must be made up.

Then stop doing sums. Give the book a word target and a finish date and let the tool keep the arithmetic: each morning it tells you the words a day that still finish on time, and after a week it tells you, from your real pace, which day you will finish. Those two numbers are the whole dashboard. If the second one lands after the first, you have a week to fix it, not a month to worry about it.

The week before

A month of drafting goes faster with a week of planning in front of it, and the planning is small. Write the ending in one sentence and the premise in two; choose a shape (three acts, a beat sheet, the hero’s journey) and take from it the six to ten turning points you believe in; break the first act into scenes with a line each on what the scene is for. An afternoon covers it, and there is a guide to that afternoon.

Give the main characters a page each: what they want, what they are afraid of, how they talk. Give the two or three main places a page. Then, the day before you start, write the first three scenes in your head while walking, so that on day one you are typing something you already know rather than staring at a blank page deciding how the book opens.

Clear the month too. Tell the people who will notice. Move the dentist. Decide the hour you will write and what you will stop doing to make room for it, because the words come out of some other hour, and if you do not choose which one, it will be sleep.

The daily hour

The same hour every day, before the day can take it, which for most people means early. Open the scene you were in, read the last paragraph only, and start. Never read the chapter back; a draft read in the morning is a draft rewritten in the morning, and rewriting is the fastest way to end the month at twelve thousand words of perfect first chapter.

Write in sprints: twenty or twenty-five minutes on a timer, no stopping, a short break, go again. Two sprints is a thousand words for most people once the habit sets. When a fact is missing (the name of the street, the year of the war, how the lock works) type a placeholder in square brackets and keep going; a search for the bracket finds them all in December. When a scene will not come, write the line [a scene where Mara finds the letter] and start the next one. The outline is there so you can skip ahead.

Finish each session in the middle of something, with a line about what happens next, so tomorrow starts without a decision. And log the words before you close the lid; watching the number move is half the reason the habit holds.

When you fall behind

You will, usually in the second week, when the opening is written and the middle has to be invented. Three rules. First, no zero days: two hundred words at eleven at night keeps the streak and keeps the book in your head, and a kept streak is worth more than the words. Second, catch up with scope, not with heroics: when the pace projection says you finish on the fourth of next month, cut a subplot or let a chapter be a paragraph of summary in brackets, rather than planning a 6,000-word Saturday you will not have. Third, when you do get a free afternoon, use it; a single 4,000-word day buys back two missed ones, and the projection moves the same evening.

If the book itself has gone wrong (the premise does not hold, the main character has nothing to want) do not go back and fix the opening. Write a note that says what changes from here, and write the rest of the book as if the opening already matched. Fixing the first act is a December job that takes a day; abandoning the draft to fix it in November is how most months end.

Day thirty-one

Save a version with the date in its name, export a copy for your own shelf, and close the book for at least two weeks. Do not send it to anyone: a beta reader who sees a draft this raw spends their one first reading on problems you already know about. When you come back, read it through in one or two sittings without a pen, then revise in passes (the shape first, then the scenes, then the sentences), which has a guide of its own.

And keep the hour. The month was never about the fifty thousand words; it was about finding out that you can write every day. A thousand words a day from here, five days a week, is a finished second draft by spring.

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