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How to Write a Book in One Year
By Michael C. Gilbert, June 2005
As a profession, creative writing is much like any other art. Most writers don't have a workplace to go to, certainly not one with expectant colleagues. Most don't have a socially supported schedule. And certainly most don't pay the bills with their writing. Like most artists, writers are fueled almost entirely by the passion of their own work.
The barriers to a robust writing discipline are formidable. In the United States, the number of hours required simply to hold down a regular job and fulfill conventional family obligations has been creeping up steadily for years. Most writers have to add writing onto a plate that is already heaping full.
Everywhere we turn, there are books and workshops that focus on the craft of writing, but very few focus on the discipline of writing. Regardless of genre or region, whether you write poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction, plot or character, there is a book or a workshop to help a writer with their craft. Some of the workshops, by virtue of their regularity or their intensity, end up helping a writer with their discipline as a kind of side effect. Some books help with discipline because they offer inspiration, at least for a short while.
The result of all this is that it is up to every writer to create and sustain their own discipline of writing. This is one of the reasons why it seems that every successful writer has their own idiosyncratic habits to which they attribute some portion of their success. Without trying to piece together the inspirational patchwork of other writers' habits, how can a new writer figure out what is going to work for them?
Most writers experience this frustration as a lack of time. There's no question that writing demands tradeoffs in the form of the loss of other work and the concomitant financial sacrifice, or the reduction of commitments to family and friends, or a serious contraction of entertainment and pastimes. But the only way these tradeoffs can happen in a way that doesn't create backlash or chaos is with some kind of discipline.
There are two ways to find such discipline: From the bottom up, with a daily practice that slowly becomes habit. And from the top down, with a vision of an end product and the work that it will take to create it. Because the vision of finishing a book in one year is so compelling to most writers, in our Keystrokes workshops, we recommend starting with the top down approach and then building a day to day, week to week practice around it.
The essential tool in the Keystrokes model of writing discipline is the book plan. A one year book plan breaks down the work of writing a book into 50 smaller increments, to correspond with 50 weeks of the year. (We figure even writers deserve two weeks off.) It's a living document that, even as it is revised during the year, continues to keep the vision of a completed book in sight and make clear the steps along the way. A good book plan will be something that someone else can read and then use to objectively evaluate the progress that you are making, week by week, season by season.
The day to day, week to week development of a writing discipline over the course of the year it takes to write this book is a process for mindfully addressing the inevitable tensions between the book plan and the realities of a writer's life. The key is to stay aware of both sides of the tension and work creatively, both alone and with peers, to continually resolve it.
The Book Plan
So, let's start with one side of that tension: the book plan. The first step toward a book plan is to define what completion of the book looks like. In other words: What does it mean to be "done" after a year?
It's best to choose one year outcomes over which the writer has direct control as a definition of "done". For example, it might be tempting to make Have a Contract for my Book as the definition, but that requires the cooperation of a publisher along with the book itself, in some form. Perfectly good one year book goals include: a first draft, a final draft, or an intermediate edit. Until you have gone through a few months of developing your daily and weekly discipline, you won't know for sure what the right goal will be, so we recommend a full first draft to most people. For the rest of this article we'll work from the assumption that this is the goal.
After determining what "done" means, then you have to analyze your book in order to develop the plan. It definitely helps to have some writing experience to do this well, because it involves answering a number of questions: How long will the book be? How will it be subdivided? What are the steps to completion of each section or chapter? Is there research involved? Can you develop an outline first? What kind of assistance will you need?
The simplest form of breakdown is by abstract percentage. For each of the one week periods to be accounted for in the plan, you need to complete two percent of the work involved in completing the draft. But it requires a lot more thinking to know what constitutes 2 percent at any given point.
The next simplest form of breakdown is the word count, at least for those books that consist primarily of words. Say the book is 100,000 words long. Assuming all words take approximately the same effort to draft, then the aforementioned two percent weekly milestone comes out to two thousand words. Word count is a common and useful model for tracking writing progress and is, in some way, a component of nearly every book plan.
Most book plans are at least somewhat more complicated than a linear accumulation of words. Most plans will have time estimates for research or planning and outlining, sometimes broken down by section or chapter, but sometimes broken down as stand alone prerequisites. In the Keystrokes workshop, we provide examples of book plans for inspiration.
The Writer's Life
The book plan will have to function in the context of your day to day life. If this process is successful, both the book plan and your life will change. But before that tension starts to work itself out, you must have a clear understanding of your life so that you are not hiding from the changes and choices to come. Denial will kill the creative processes required to build a writing discipline sufficient to finishing a book in one year.
Some of the things you need to know about your life: What are your current time commitments? How important is each one? Can you break those commitments down into smaller pieces and rank the importance of those pieces? Are there things that are actually important to you, that you are willing to give up for a year, for your writing?
Just as important as knowing your priorities is knowing your habits and patterns, because regardless of what you say is important, it's how you actually spend your time that matters. Sometimes there are social patterns that rule our lives. Sometimes there are hidden patterns of anxiety or depression. And sometimes, there are just simple habits and routines.
It's worth looking at how your commitments and circumstances resemble those of other writers, at various stages of their lives. Do they have children or loved ones for whom they have major obligations? What other sort of employment do they have? What are their financial circumstances? In the Keystrokes workshop, we include panelists whose lives capture some of the different patterns that people face and we learn that different circumstances can lead to wildly different patterns of coping with a writing goal.
Creative Tensions
So, each of these first two steps is a kind of snapshot. One is a snapshot of your plan to write a book in a year, a week by week vision of progress. The other is a snapshot of your life and the related choices that will need to be made in order to realize the vision. The next step is to turn these snapshots into a motion picture.
The Keystrokes model is built around weekly accountability. The key to such accountability is to make space to fully assess your progress on the book plan, in the context of your daily realities, and to then develop and make the changes needed to continue to move ahead. There are two complementary ways to make this kind of space: personal accountability and group accountability.
Personal accountability is the hardest of all. In order to develop personal accountability around writing and nurture the creative tensions that will transform your life into that of a writer and enable you to finish a book in a year, we recommend two things: maintaining a log book or journal of your writing discipline and a weekly process of reflection and decision making.
In this journal, at a minimum, you would record the following: the weekly objectives from your book plan, your progress toward those objectives, a precise daily record of your writing time and products, a weekly reflection on how and why you were (or were not) able to make your weekly objectives, thoughts about what you might have done differently or worked particularly well the preceding week, decisions about how to develop your discipline for the following week, decisions about changing the book plan, and reflections upon whether the choices required by the book plan are worth it to you. Yes, we recommend a weekly recommitment.
The weekly process of reflection is primarily guided by maintaining this journal. But you might also make time for things like: renegotiating other commitments and expectations, sharing your reflections and related needs with others, researching how other writers have coped with your barriers and challenges, and communicating your commitment to others on whom you depend for support.
This segues nicely with the matter of accountability in a group setting. Each writer has their own immediate social group to deal with, whether family or friends or colleagues. We're fortunate when our social groups are supportive of our new goals. When they are not, we can benefit from being part of a group that is.
The Keystrokes model involved the regular, ongoing support of a group of writers who are similarly committed to finishing a book in one year. A support group of this kind serves several purposes. First, other writers are a source of ideas for a writer's life and can help with the week by week problem solving involved in accommodating an ambitious goal like a book. Second, meeting with a support group (whether in person or online) serves as a space for putting forth the reflections in your weekly journal and being accountable for resolving the issues raised. Third, a support group can be a source of one or two key individuals, who might provide the kind of one on one support that some people find essential.
Next Steps
You probably have a book you want to write. But life is short and maybe the book is not as important as the thousand other projects (and people) to which you are committed. Maybe you have other means by which you will leave your wisdom behind to future generations. But then again, perhaps the book is really important after all and you just need a framework that supports its completion.
The next step for most people facing this decision is a reality check. We recommend that you complete the first two parts of the Keystrokes model, the book plan and the life assessment, and see how you feel. How unrealistic is the vision? What are you willing to give up to achieve it? There is no shame in deciding that other things are more important, but there might be some shame in never deciding at all.
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