Writing A Book In Two Weeks – Looking At It Two Years Later

Two and a half years ago – because the world was closed down and I had nowhere to go – I sat down to write a book.

Two weeks later, I had a finished draft.

Since then, I haven’t even looked at that draft, not even once. Not until now, when I suddenly found myself having time to sit down and read through it, before I start editing and revising, and I figured this could be a good lesson and an opportunity to evaluate myself.

Back then, I seem to be pretty happy with the results. You can read all about here, but the gist of it seems to be that I was happy with the experience, that it wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be, and that I surprised myself. You see, I usually don’t write enough when I draft, and I often flesh out scenes in the later editing phase. You’d think it’d be difficult for me to write such a huge amount in such a short time, but apparently I managed.

I also didn’t use to plan my books. Now, that has changed over the course of the last two and a half years, but back then I would just sit down and write whatever came to my head, in the moment, starting out with a very basic idea and see where it took me.

So – now that I’ve picked up the book again and finally started going through it, how do I think it went?

Well, I’m only about 20% in, but so far, I’m impressed. The plot seems driven and strong, and the characters are surprisingly nuanced. Most of the scenes also appear to be unusually fleshed out and detailed. Maybe I’ve been underestimating myself before?

But the spelling mistakes… Oh wow. Deliberately writing as fast as you can does something weird to your brain. There are so many crazy spelling mistakes, so many missing words and wrong uses of words, it’s hilarious. It looks like I could have been drunk the entire time (which I’m fairly certain I wasn’t!)

I’ll come back to this post and update as I go through more of the book, but so far, I’m impressed with past Me!