Ten Key Steps In Writing Your Novel #4

The #4 Key Step:

You need to set a schedule of how much time you have in each day to write and how many words you want to write.

You don’t have to write a lot.

Ernest Hemingway wrote his first book, The Sun Also Rises in seven weeks—that’s approximately 1,500 words a day, but for more of his life he averaged 50 words a day when, as he would say, “the going was good.”

Set a goal for yourself.

For example. There are approximately 250 words on a printed page. So your goal is to write 1,000 words. Or four pages. Some days you’ll only manage to produce one page, other days you may write 15 pages.

If you maintain this routine, you will have a 240-page book at the end of 60 days.

That’s your first draft.

Now, you start to rewrite.

And that is what writing a book is all about. Rewriting and rewriting.

Remember this. You don’t have to write 1,000 pages just because technology makes it easy for you to do it. The computer and the Internet make it tempting to over-reach and over-write, but keep thinking small.  We all feel that movies and baseball games are too long. What about books? Publishers and editors will tell you: A story determines its own length. Remember that The Great Gatsby, one of our great American novels, is just 200 pages long.