How to Write 100,000+ Words in a Month
To the creators,
If you read the heading, you read right, or should I say write? I’m joking 😉.
If you’ve been following my blog, then you would know that I’ve been working on writing a book (Project Teal (not the real title, just a title for the project) for the last year, wow, it’s been a year. And if you didn’t know, you can check out the tab Writing and Writing Diaries to follow along with my journey 😊. Part of this summer was all about buckling down to really hone in on the story of Project Teal. I wanted to take this time and figure out my characters, cut back on the word count, and to get the story to be more concise with what I wanted it to tell.
But I’m only human and that meant most of the time I would be discouraged to write. It wasn’t a lack of motivation per say, but a fear that what I would write wouldn’t be good enough. But then I thought to myself, I’m not going to get anywhere in life if I just sit on my butt dwelling on how bad my writing’s going to be if I don’t actually write. If you’re like me and you have that niggling fear in the back of your head all the time about writing, I’m going to tell you something: the best way to get that voice to stop is to write.
You have to keep writing no matter how much it scares you. (But of course, you can take your break days too).
Once I told myself this, I really started to get in the zone of what I wanted to do. I created a daily schedule of what I wanted to do and gave myself deadlines on how far along I wanted to get in my edits. And let me tell you, doing this was life changing. It’s the game changer you never knew you needed.
School finished for me about May 10, 2019 and I worked on my third edit for Project Teal all the way until June 17, 2019 when I’m writing this blog post. Because guess what? I finished my third edit of Project teal with about 128,000 words and yes, I know, that’s a lot of words and I’m going to try cut down!! Don’t worry. I also know that writing a book the first way though is nothing compared to editing a book that you’ve written, but for me editing a book involved rewriting practically every scene while copying and pasting some scenes here and there. So maybe that’s why I was able to write 100,000+ words in a month, but most of those words came from scratch though.
So if you’r bored this summer and you’ve always wanted to write a book, I’m going to give you my very loose outline of what I did in a month to write 100,000+ words so that you can too.
Loose Writing Schedule
- 11 am – 12 pm : Write
- 2 pm – 3 pm: Write some more
- 8 pm – 10 pm: Write the most
This gave me a total of four hours of writing a day so that I could really focus on what I wanted to do. By no means do you have to stick to this schedule to write 100,000+ words—-it’s just the schedule that worked best for me. You can totally change around the times where you feel the most inspired. For me, my brain’s not fully awake until after 9 o’clock. Anything before that I feel like I wouldn’t write the best I could be because I would still be waking up. But before I get into writing at 11 o’clock, I would read for an hour or so to draw inspiration from written words and to really just stimulate my mind to get it ready to write. So 11 o’clock to me was the sweet spot where my brain felt like it was functioning and it was also the perfect time because after I write, I can eat. And who doesn’t love eating? So maybe writing at 11 o’clock will work for you as it works for me, but again, chose times that works for you.
I also chose 2 pm to 3 pm because that’s the middle of the day and after writing for an hour or so, I want to give my brain a break. And my eyes too. So make sure if you do create your own time schedule of when to write, that you space it out to give yourself time to look at other things and to really take your mind of writing for a bit. When you do so, you’ll come back to your writing more focused and with more creative juices flowing. Also for me 2 pm to 3 pm was also a good time because at 3 pm was snack time. Honestly, when they saw be motivated by food, I take that to another level 🤪
Also when I was in elementary school at 3 o’clock we would always have snack times, so my bodies kind of used to the idea that I eat a light snack at that time. But if you like to nap during this time and that’s your fuel, then by all means. Do what works for you.
Then I really get deep into my writing at night when the sun isn’t shining so bright and the night calms down. I like writing at night the most because it feels like the world is at peace and that there’s no one there to bother you. It’s just you and you’re computer. So that’s where I spend a lot of the time writing. I sit down on the couch under good lighting and try to type up as much words as I can before I go to sleep. You can type more than your allotted time, of course.
But the thing is, when you’re writing, don’t be too concerned about word count. Trust me. It’s nice to feel like you’re making progress by seeing how much words you’ve written with each session during the day, but I find that if you say you want to write X amount of words during this session or that session, you feel more pressured to hit that goal. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But sometimes when you’re writing with so much pressure on yourself, you really get lost in trying to expand what you’re writing to make that word count or you find yourself being frustrated when you don’t write enough and that can lead to this overall great frustration that doesn’t need to happen. Writing is a process, so take your time. Don’t be hard on yourself if you don’t write a lot one day because you’ll have your good writing days and your bad writing days.
The point is that you write.
And writing doesn’t always mean, typing on the computer. It means sitting down with a notebook or a piece of paper, outlining what you’re going to write. It’s about researching the history or things you want to portray accurately in your story. It’s about watching a show or a movie for research purposes. It’s about looking up at the ceiling, thinking how you want this scene to play out or what you want to happen. It’s just about thinking about writing and how you’re going to go about it. It might not seem like you’re writing—-like you’re being unproductive—-but you need those days where you sit and stare at the ceiling and when you outline to really know where things are going because you don’t want to find yourself wiring a scene—–rushing into it——and only scraping it later because it wasn’t what you really wanted. So don’t rush things. Think it through. Your writing will thank you for it. You’ll thank you for it.
As much as the word count does count, it’s not everything. If you keep working on your craft and writing in more ways than one, the words will come and the they will add up before you know it. At the end of the day, sometimes I do look at the word count just so I can compare it to the day before to see how much I progressed and if you want to do that, then that’s fine.
So try to write everyday as much as you can. I know that sometimes it can be daunting and difficult to do, but you can do it!! I BELIEVE in you! And If you need a day to take a break and rethink things, take a day, it’s not going to hurt you—–it’ll help you.
I just want to say that this post doesn’t come with a 100% guarantee that you’ll definitely write 100,000+ words by the end of a month, but it’s just a post to give you somewhat an idea of how you can achieve that. If you write 50,000 or 10,000 or 5,000 words by the end of the month because that’s what works best for you based on what’s going on in your life, then that’s PERFECTLY fine——writing isn’t a race, it’s a journey and some journey’s take longer than others. Just be proud that you started the journey and that you’re going places.
So this is to my writers and my creators: work on your craft as much as you can with as much passion you can. If you’re not working on it, it’s not going anywhere. If you take one step, write that one word, paint that one stem, or create that one thing, then that’s better than you have done if you haven’t given anything towards what you love. And the next day, take two steps, write two words, be twice as good as you were before. It’s about progression to succession. And I have another writing diary about progress to success if you want to read that as well.
Keep working hard and do what works for you.
And as always, with love,
