90,000 Words Under the Sea

How I Wrote 90,000 Words in One Summer Without Burning Out

After reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace I was inspired to major in English, become a professor, and write novels. So, I chose an English advisor and declared English as my major. After I graduated, I said, “Okay, now its time to write a novel.” So, I sat down and opened up my laptop, and I started typing on a blank word document. After just a few minutes of typing, I realized I had no ideas for a novel… I was stuck. I had nothing.

 I remembered a book I read in a class I took on how to teach/tutor writing, it was called Writing Without Teachers by Peter Elbow. The kernel of the idea I implemented was to write about what I would write about, if I were to write a novel. Since I realized I was not ready to write a novel, I decided to just keep a journal essentially brainstorming ideas for a novel. I then recalled another suggestion from one of my professors which was to write for at least fifteen minutes a day. So, I decided to write for at least fifteen minutes a day about what I would write about (this is often called “low-stakes” writing.)

Then the problem was I really didn’t even have 15 min. a day worth of ideas for novels either, so I implemented another suggestion from Writing Without Teachers which is to allow yourself to go off on tangents and most importantly don’t stop writing. I took this to the extreme of writing “uh,” “um,” “I don’t know what to write,” “blah blah blah,” etc. when nothing was coming to mind, I still kept typing. Which relates to another suggestion: don’t worry about grammar or spelling or punctuation and importantly don’t go back and delete, just keep writing forward. And relatedly don’t censor yourself, that will only impede the flow.

What I noticed was that, over some time, the quality of my thinking started to improve and the times I had to write the filler words (“uh,” “um,” …) began to decrease. I wasn’t necessarily writing about novel ideas the whole time yet, I would still go off on tangents (about anything, what I did that day, what I might do tomorrow, etc.), but I was always typing. And I would always do at least 15 min., but sometimes I would get in a groove and I would type a little longer. Or I might write multiple times in one day.

My goal then became a 90,000-word document, an average word count for a novel, since that was my ultimate goal. All the while I kept reading books and articles on the practice of writing. Multiple sources recommend writing 10 drafts to produce a high-quality work, so I considered these early 90,000-word brainstorming journals as early drafts. I wrote three of such documents. And I kept finding various ways to fill them.

I read that when you first start writing, most of what you will write will be cliched, so you have to keep writing until you write through those cliches. I then even made writing cliches my goal, what were all the cliches I knew? So, I would write what I remembered about stories like Disney movies or similar ideas. And then I began to add thoughts on how to make them better if I were to write them.

At one point I even incorporated into these documents of keeping a dream journal, which required me to start writing as soon as I woke to try and capture the details before I forgot them. Overtime, I began to remember more and more details from my dreams and extended these sections. When I generated enough content from my dream journal, I tried to organize them into similar elements, and create a kind of unified story out of all of them. Ultimately, I didn’t like what I saw, and it was at this point (at the end of three 90,000-word documents) that I decided it was time to write a novel.

I still didn’t feel confident enough that I would know how to write a novel, so I googled “How to write a novel.” One thing that came up was “The Snowflake Method For Designing a Novel” which I liked because it had 10 steps to follow. I fancied myself an intellectual and literary type, so previously the thought of following some cookie cutter method to writing a novel was pretty abhorrent. But at this point, after writing 270,000 words (over a year’s time), I was pretty resigned to the fact that the first novel I was going to write was going to be pretty shitty, so I might as well try and get it over with as fast as possible so that I could move onto the next draft. This aligns with the ideas of “Shitty First Drafts” from Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird, and just makes logical sense: when you are learning something new, you will likely be bad at it at first. So, I was comfortable enough to follow a generic 10-step guide to writing my first novel.

The “Snowflake Method” of writing a novel starts out with writing a one-sentence summary of the novel, then basically goes back and forth between expanding that summary and adding and expanding character backgrounds and storylines. It can be a little nerve-wracking to think about committing to a one-sentence version of your novel for the first step but the point is that it can evolve as you go. And the method gives time suggestions for each of these steps to keep things moving. And so that was another mindset that I adopted: I can always go back and change it latter, but now I should just keep moving forward within the time limits.

I also resolved to ideas like: I should not do any research for my novel. Even though my novel had a historical element to it, I knew if I started researching, I might never stop, so the first draft I would write without research and just go from memory/fill in the blanks.

While going through this Snowflake Method, which essentially starts as an extensive outlining process, I still also kept up my habit of writing my journal for 15 min. a day. So, I was still doing some brainstorming and tangential thinking on the side. But when I was working on the outline, I wouldn’t allow myself to go off on tangents outside the bounds of the story of the novel, I wouldn’t start writing about what I did that day, for example.

When I would write in my free-write journal, I would type as fast as possible, but when I was limiting my thinking to the novel only, I had to slow down my writing process just a little bit. But my habit and practice of writing fast in my journal, and continuing to regularly do that, helped give me the moment to keep moving forward even when I had to slow down.

Anytime I came to a kind of fork in the road where I had to make one of two choices, instead of taking time to think about it, I forced myself to just immediately make a choice again telling myself that I could always go back and change it later. This ensured I never stopped and avoided the possibility of getting bogged down in writer’s block.

I even made the decision, however, that I would not go back and change things until after I finished the first draft. If I did suddenly want to go in a different direction, or choose a different path than I had already, I would just do it, and not worry about coherence and just go with the new idea; I could revise for coherence at the end of the draft. I read that somewhere from some writer, “At the end of the 1^st draft, I go back and revise and make it look like I knew what I was doing.”

So, again, I wasn’t writing for quality, I was writing for speed and simple completion. So, I really leaned into the shitty first draft and even at times tried to write badly by including those trite cliches. What I found is that by doing that, my narrative thinking began to improve, as the cliché idea would come to mind, but I would start to recognize it as bad, and see a better alternative. This cycle continued throughout the process.

In the Snowflake Method, after creating an extensive outline, it comes down to actually sit down and write the thing. But by creating that outline and writing about the novel, you have essentially rehearsed writing the novel already. And this was especially true for me since I was also brainstorming ideas on the side in my free-write journal.

I added one step before I sat down to write the novel. I wanted to have some goal/estimate of how long it would take to reach my 90,000 words. I had already started to do this with my journals. Each time I sat down to write, I would note my start and my end time, and track how many words I wrote during that time. Then at the end of the 90,000-word document, I added all that up to calculate my average words/minute speed. So, I used that speed as a rough estimate to calculate how many hours I would need to spend to complete the novel. When limiting my writing to focused on the story only, though, I knew I would write slower, so I would have to recalculate that speed.

So, in the morning, writing for fifteen minutes in a free-write journal was still the first thing I did, but now, I would review the outline I had created, look quickly at the next scene on the list, and I would free-write about that scene for fifteen minutes to start fleshing out some more details. And then I would switch to actually writing the scene. At this point, because of all the prep work I had done and outlining and essentially rehearsing, the words flowed much easier and I still forced myself to just keep typing, albeit at a slower speed. After writing a few chapters/pages, and still keeping track of my start time, end time, and word count, I calculated that I was writing at about 500 words per hour (roughly a page per hour), and so I used that to calculate how many hours I would need (180 total hours of writing.)

I then applied the idea from Haruki Murakami’s book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. In that book, Murakami explains that he learned how to write from the way he learned to train for long distance running. The most simplest point being that just like you would slowly build up your running distance and speed over time, is the same way you train for long-form writing. So, the first week, I planned to write for an hour a day. Then the second week, I planned to write for two hours a day, the third week for three hours, the fourth for four, and the fifth for four. And so knowing my word speed, I also knew how many words I needed to hit each week to stay on track, and so I stuck to that plan. And it worked.

By that fifth week, I would still wake up and start free-writing immediately for 15 min. about the chapters that I was going to write that day, and then I would shift to writing the actual novel. I would write continuously for two hours in the morning, then I would break for lunch and go for a run (I took Murakami’s literal practice of running as well), and then I would sit down and write continuously for 3 hours for a total of 5 hours a day. And then I would be done. Then I would go hang out with friends or any other activity and not think about writing for the rest of the day. And after writing for five hours, I really had no capacity to think anymore about writing. I found that 5 hours a day was my limit.

The only thing I added was something I read from Stephen King, which is that as he would fall asleep, he would think about/imagine/tell himself the story he was writing. And so that’s how I would end each day.

Luckily, I was a high school teacher at this time, and it was summer, so I had the summer off from work and had the time to be able to follow this routine every day. I had done so much work between practicing writing and creating this story that the words really did flow out continuously. And more than that, I was imagining and building this world and these characters in my head at the same time. In some sense, I was almost just transcribing what was already appearing in my head in real time. You might think that this might be kind of boring if everything is already determined ahead of time. But I really only had an outline, and while writing, I had to figure out how to get from point A to point B and there were still choices and decisions to be made on how to get there.

And so again, any time a choice or decision came up, I just forced myself to make one and keep moving. And if later, I wanted to change, I just changed without worrying about coherence. And if an idea came up that wasn’t in my outline, I just went with it, as that also made it fun to discover new ideas.

So, all my practices and build up worked together to help me smoothly write a novel. There was no hint of writer’s block and the system carried me through to the end.