How to Write a Novel in Three Months

I won’t be offended if nobody has noticed but maybe some of you have: my blog has been awfully quiet for the last three months. I didn’t plan it. It just sort of happened. Because I started writing a new novel. And I just never stopped. At least, not until last week when I finished the first draft. Yes, I wrote an entire 100,000-plus word novel in just under three months.

I was posting on Twitter whenever I hit milestones so I can actually track how I progressed:

26 April – began writing
30 May – 10,000 words
7 June – 20,000 words
10 June – 30,000 words
11 June – 40,000 words
11 June – 44,000 words
14 June – 50,000 words
16 June – 60,000 words
18 June – 70,000 words
21 June – 75,000 words
22 June – 80,000 words
28 June – 90,000 words
15 July – 100,000 words
17 July – 103,000 words and done

According to those dates, I wrote 80,000 words in June alone! I slowed down after that and I remember why. Because I got to about 95,000 words and realised the plot had been heading in the wrong direction for the past 10,000 words. I deleted a large chunk, thought about it for a bit and then started writing again with some new ideas.

On some days, I wrote over 10,000 words and on other days, I wrote nothing (those days were mostly when I had family commitments I couldn’t get out of). When I average it out, I wrote approximately 1,250 words a day. For anyone who’s been reading my blog posts for a while, you might remember I do something called Project October every year. It’s a month of intensive writing where I try to get 1,000 words a day down on paper. I’ve been doing it for years and it’s something I’ve always found very exhausting. Usually, by the time the end of the month rolls around, I’m absolutely desperate to stop writing for a while.

So imagine how amazed I was when I just kept writing and writing and writing for nearly three months. I did three Project Octobers in a row. And not only that, I was actually enjoying it!

Anyway, I thought you might like to know how I did it and see if you can do it, too.

Don’t Start from Scratch
I think part of the reason I was able to accomplish so much in such a (relatively) short period of time was because I’d been thinking about these characters for a while. At the end of 2019, I finished writing a crime novel that I’d been writing for seven years. I left it alone for a year while I edited and published another book, then went back to it at the end of 2020 to do rewrites. But I was pretty happy with it and barely made any changes.

Even though I’d written it as a stand-alone book, I really liked those characters. I particularly wondered about a couple of moments of sexual tension between two of the main characters. The story in the first book didn’t lend itself to the possibility of any romance but I was desperate to find out what happened after that story concluded. I started daydreaming about it. I couldn’t stop daydreaming about it. And the only way to stop daydreaming about it was to write it and find out.

As I started writing the sequel, I realised it felt a lot like writing fan fiction. I’ve never written fan fiction myself but one of my nieces reads a lot of it and I felt the way she acts when she talks about it. It was wonderful exploring the beginnings of this new relationship. Of course, then I had to murder somebody (it is a crime novel, after all). But the fact that I was already so invested in these people and that I knew them really well made it so satisfying that I just wanted to keep going and going and going. So I did.

Don’t Have a Day Job
I’ve been working for myself for the past couple of years now so I don’t have a traditional day job that takes up all my time. Of course, freelance work would come in and I would complete it as it did but for the most part, I had a lot of time to do as I pleased. And it pleased me to write.

I know if you have a day job that it’s not practical for me to tell you not to do your day job. I’m just telling you how I accomplished writing a novel in three months and that was a huge part of it.

Don’t Do Anything Other Than Write
Okay, look, I did do a few other things – eating, sleeping, watching a game of football here and there, babysitting my nieces on a couple of occasions – but on the whole, writing took up most of my time. It may also have helped that where I live, we went into a three-week lockdown to get on top of a COVID outbreak and I wasn’t allowed to leave my house except for necessities.

But even when I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about the story and the characters all the time. I got a bit obsessed. I fell in love a little with one of the characters and couldn’t get him out of my head. When I wrote his first kiss with the other main character, my breath caught in my chest. When I wrote their second kiss, I nearly passed out from the pure joy it gave me. I just kept writing because I was so excited to know what would happen next.

Don’t Worry Too Much About Character Names
I usually spend a lot of time coming up with the perfect names for my characters but for this, because I wanted to keep powering on, I would scroll and point on my Twitter feed and give them placeholder names. That was how I ended up with Jock, Jack, Jillian, Janet, Janey, Judith, Jude, Jake, Jenna, Jim, James and Ginny.

The first thing I did after I finished the first draft was spend a day renaming all the characters and they’re a much more diverse bunch now. But I’m glad I didn’t worry about it at the time I was writing the story because it would have slowed me down for sure.

Don’t Power on When You Know Something Isn’t Working
I had two moments of pause during the three months I was writing this novel. The first was at 40,000 words:

It was a small pause though:

Phew!

The second pause happened when I got to around 95,000 words. I was stuck again. I went back to find the last point at which I was happy with the story and the first point at which I stopped being happy with the story. It was at around the 85,000-word mark. I’d written 10,000 words that weren’t taking the story in the right direction.

But I didn’t delete them. Instead, I cut them and pasted them into another document. Why? Because there were little moments between the characters that I knew were good and I wanted to incorporate them back into the manuscript if I could.

I rewrote the 10,000 words between 85,000 and 95,000 words three times, meaning I actually wrote about 30,000 words to get those 10,000 words right. But once it was done, I knew the story was back on track and the end wasn’t far away.

Don’t Overthink the Ending
Once I got to the last part of the book, I realised I had no idea how to end the story. The previous book had a wonderful twist and I wanted something similar for this one. I tied myself in knots trying to come up with one. And… nothing.

I searched the internet for articles on how to end a novel. One of them gave the advice that it should be unpredictable but logical. Simple enough when someone else points it out. I was writing a crime novel so there were four logical options:

*The killer dies.
*The killer gets off scot-free.
*The killer goes to a clinic for the criminally insane.
*The killer goes to jail.

In the first book, the killer (spoiler alert) dies so I thought it would be too much of the same thing. And there’s no poetic justice (let alone actual justice) if the killer gets off scot-free. That left a clinic for the criminally insane or jail. Was the killer sick or just evil? In the end, a little bit of both. But what I realised was that the killer had spent the while book terrorising a group of people and the thing that would really annoy them was not getting what they wanted, having what they wanted dangled in front of them and taken away at the very last moment. A final death was averted and the group of people the killer had terrorised were safe, much to the killer’s dismay. It’s not perfect but I’ve got plenty of time for rewrites to get it as close to perfect as I can.

*****

And that’s pretty much it. Except for, you know, the long and hard slog. It’s unavoidable. But if I could do one of these long and hard slogs every year instead of writing more slowly all year round, I think I’d choose it. Especially if I have as much fun spending time with the characters I’m writing as I did this time around.

The only problem? I’m already wondering what happens to them next.