A Writer’s Quest

Writing a book is a very substantial task. If you are going to get it done you will need discipline and defined targets.

There are two key quantifiable targets when it comes to book writing: word count and time.

Word count is perhaps the easiest to work out. If you have a target size for your book in mind (perhaps easier for non-fiction than fiction), pick an existing book of roughly the size and layout that you have in mind. Count the number of pages (don’t include the blank pages for layout purposes). Take a typical page and count how many words are on the page. Multiply this by the number of pages and you have a very rough word count. A relatively small paperback novel will have around 55,000 words (James Herbert’s The Rats, his first novel, is this size). A more substantial novel may be 90,000 words and huge ones even larger. Non-fiction books typically have a lower word count for the same number of pages because most will include illustrations and photographs. Some books will easily fill over half the space with photographs. Books for young children will have even fewer words.

This word count can be a very useful tool as you write. All word processor programs will display a word count. Microsoft Word can be set to display this in the status area below the active text window. It can serve as a progress indicator and help you meet your writing targets. In the case of non-fiction writing it can help you greatly in balancing parts of the book, as you may, for example, desire roughly equivalent sizes for various parts, sections or chapters of the book. If you select a block of text, Word will display the word count of just that section.

Time is a much trickier prospect but is essential to manage unless you want to be one of those authors with an unfinished manuscript sitting in a drawer or on your hard drive. In his book ‘On Writing’, Stephen King says that he aims to finish a first draft of a book in three months. He believes that over any longer time it is hard to keep the momentum going and take a character-driven approach to writing his fiction. This seems completely reasonable to me for fiction and his approach of not doing editing as he goes but just getting the first draft down as it comes. Three months is 90 days, so if you are aiming for a roughly 90,000-word novel you will need to get down 1,000 words a day, every day. Now as in everything else in life, it is critical to know yourself, to be realistic about your time availability and commitments. It may be that for you 500 words a day and a six-month target is more appropriate. Only you can tell. I find that putting in the hard work is much easier when an end is in sight and the duration is not too long. Three months is probably good psychology, as it represents one season and it seems that much of the way people really work is seasonal. Remember that the way you like to work will affect your output. When writing non-fiction I tend to like to edit and revise as I go, so it may take me longer to get to the target word count but the text is cleaner (I hope).

Writing is no easy task and just how hard it is becomes obvious when you work out a word count and target time scale. Of course for articles rather than books the task is much easier, though still daunting for the beginning writer. Every writer falls into a pattern of work that function for them. You want one that plays to your strengths and works around your weaknesses. I’m still coming to grips with how I write fiction. My non-fiction process is nicely developed:

1. Basic concept development
2. Initial research
3. Outline development of major headings
4. Detailed research
5. Filling out the sections, sometimes revisiting steps 3 and 4

Whether this remains my approach with fiction remains to be seen, with outline development of major plot points replacing item three. My intention is to try both this and character driven flow and see which one works for me.

One thing to remember with writing is that it is a mix of skill and creativity. Skill can be learned and benefits from practice. Creativity also benefits from exercise, so as many have said write a lot and it gets easier. It is very hard to write a book if you have trouble writing a letter.