Writer's Craft Article by Karen S.
Wiesner
Two Crucial Writing Goal
Sheets
Based on FIRST DRAFT OUTLINE (formerly
titled FIRST DRAFT IN 30 DAYS)
Once
you become a published author, the pressure to maintain the standard of quality
with every book is crucial. Publishers and readers will expect that, as you the
author have to of yourself. That’s why it’s absolutely essential to become a
productive writer as soon as you can--ideally, before you sell your first book. You’ll be confident about what you
can do, and you’ll have more to offer any publisher who contracts for your
books.
A
good rule of thumb for unpublished writers is to stay one or two projects ahead
of your submissions. If you’re a
published author, you should stay one or two projects ahead of your releases. Three to six months before a
new year, you need to be thinking--or preferably working--on next year's
projects.
Writing Goals
The
purpose of a writing goal sheet is to help you determine how much time you need
to spend turning your formatted outline into a manuscript draft. To complete
this goal sheet, you’ll need to have a rough estimate of how much you can
accomplish on a daily basis. As a general rule, writing at least one scene a
day, regardless of how long or short that scene ends up, is ideal. If you’re
prone to writer’s block, the chances of burning out or hitting a roadblock are
significantly less when you’re brainstorming on one scene a day instead of two
or more. Furthermore, each scene must be written with its own mood and objective--it
can be difficult to switch gears in the middle of your writing session when you
have to move on to the next scene. If you stick to writing one scene every day,
you’ll rarely feel you’re doing too much or too little. If your scenes are
consistently too long or short, you may need to re-evaluate whether your pacing
is on track, and make any necessary adjustments.
For
some authors, it works best to write a certain number of pages a day instead of
a scene or more a day. Personally, I find this method to be inefficient, though
I know everyone's different and what works for one writer is unimaginable to
another and vice versa. Writing page by page, even if you’re going strong, do
you stop at 10 pages using this method? If you’re not feeling inspired at all,
do you quit at 10 pages, even if you’re in the middle of a scene or, heck, in
the middle of a sentence? How does that work? Regardless of whether it's not
really that dramatic where a page-by-pager cuts off for the day, to me if you
haven't finished the scene, you are
essentially in the middle of something that has a very specific mood. To come
back the next day (or whenever) is to interrupt that mood, which you'll have to
start from scratch to get back into when you return. It would drive me crazy to
work that way. However, if you choose to write a certain number of pages per
day, your goal sheet would be based on the projected length of the book. The
chart below will help you estimate the number of pages in your complete
manuscript based on the number of words you’re shooting for:
(estimated 250 words per page)
50,000 words = 200 pages
60,000 words = 240 pages
70,000 words = 280 pages
80,000 words = 320 pages
90,000 words = 360 pages
100,000 words = 400 pages
Therefore,
if you estimate your book will be 50,000 words and you want to write 10 pages a
day (not taking holidays or weekends into account), your goal sheet might look
something like this:
1/1: write 10 pages
1/2: write 10 pages
1/3: write 10 pages
1/4: write 10 pages
1/5: write 10 pages
Test
yourself for a week or a couple weeks by writing however many pages you can and
taking notes on what you accomplish each day. At the end of the time, figure
out your average number of pages per day. Then add a page or two to your daily
page goal to challenge yourself.
It
might sound impossible to accurately predict how long it’ll take you to
complete a project, especially down to the day (assuming life doesn’t throw you
any radical curves). But there is a method for doing just that that anyone can
use. You need to complete the following steps before you can make your
prediction:
1. Develop a solid
idea of how much you’re able to write per working day. (This method works best
if you write scene by scene rather than page by page.)
2. Determine whether
you’ll work weekends or holidays, and what your schedule (personal, writing,
and your other job, if you have one) is like for the time period in which
you’ll be working on this particular book.
3. Complete a formatted
outline, with scenes divided.
First,
make sure you allow the outline sufficient shelf-time before you begin writing.
Next, plan to give yourself at least a week or two before you start writing to
go over your outline and make sure it’s still solid.
Using
a blank sheet of paper and your formatted outline, make a list of the scenes
within the book, putting one scene on each line. Obviously, these scenes will
come from your formatted outline. You can simply make a sequential list of
scenes, as shown below:
scene 1
scene 2
scene 3
scene 4
scene 5
Or
you can specify chapter and scene number:
Prologue
chapter 1, scene 1
chapter 1, scene 2
chapter 2, scene 1
chapter 2, scene 2
Figure
out how many working days you’ll have in a month. (I generally don’t write on
weekends, so for me, most months amount to approximately twenty working days.)
Now, get out your calendar or planner--whatever you use to schedule your days.
Any standard calendar of the upcoming months will work, but if you have events
(dentist appointment or whatever) planned during the time you’ll be working,
you’ll want to take that into account on your writing goal sheet.
Decide
the date you want to begin writing and mark it down on your writing goal sheet
next to the first scene. If you’re writing one scene per day, you will then
write the next date by the second scene, etc. Don’t forget to skip weekends and
holidays if you don’t plan to write on those days.
8/9: prologue
8/10: chapter 1, scene 1
8/11: scene 2
8/12: chapter 2, scene 1
8/13: scene 2
By
the time you’ve put a date next to each scene in your book, you know exactly
when you’ll be done with the first draft.
It’s
my experience, after outlining and writing close to 150 books, that an outline
will be approximately a quarter of the size of your finished story. There
certainly can be a wide variance because every project is different and some
authors write consistently short or long scenes. The list below is an estimate
of how the number of scenes in an outline will translate to novel length,
assuming there are roughly 250 words per page:
up to 20 scenes in an outline = a novella-length work of
7,000–15,000 words
30–40 scenes in the outline = 50,000–75,000 words
41–70 scenes in the outline = 76,000–90,000 words
71 or more scenes in the outline = 100,000+ words
Here
are some examples of how I figured out my own schedule estimations:
Vows & the
Vagabond
· 46 scenes at 20
working days per month
· 2 months, 6
days to write an 80,000 word novel, not including editing, polishing, and
proposal
· budget 2 1⁄2 to
3 months for project completion
No Ordinary
Love
· 68 scenes at 20
working days per month
· 3 months, 8
days to write a 90,000 word novel, not including editing, polishing, and
proposal
· budget 3 1⁄2 to
4 months for project completion
Tears on Stone
· 74 scenes at 20
working days per month
· 3 months, 14
days to write a 110,000-word novel, not including editing, polishing, and
proposal
· budget 4 months
for project completion
You’ll
notice I budgeted some extra time at the end of the writing process--that's for
editing and polishing.
As
soon as an outline is complete, you can work up a writing goal sheet, taking
into account shelf-time and a week or two for outline review and revision.
Yearly Goals
Once
you have a writing goal sheet, you can then translate the information from your
writing goal sheet directly into a yearly goal sheet, something like:
Yearly Goals
With New Writing Goal
|
WHAT I want to accomplish
|
WHEN I want to accomplish it
|
|
Write Vows
& the Vagabond
|
January
10-February 26
|
|
Write Tears on
Stone
|
March 8-June 8
|
|
Write No
Ordinary Love
|
July
3-September 4
|
Accurately
estimating the time you’ll spend on various projects during the year will be
very helpful when you’re filling out your yearly goal sheets. If you want to see
examples of detailed, multiyear goal sheets, visit my WIP page here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/works-in-progress.html.
Remember:
Being productive should not mean being rushed. If a story needs more time, give
it all it needs--as long as you continue
to meet your daily goals. If you’re a beginner, you may need to be more
flexible, but having personal goals can help you no matter what stage you’re
in. Should you find that you’re daily goals make you feel rushed, take time to
evaluate whether you’re trying to do too much. Would one scene per day be more
manageable for you than two? Be more flexible with yearly goals than daily
goals.
Karen S. Wiesner is the author of First
Draft Outline and Cohesive Story Building
Volumes 1 and
2 of the 3D Fiction Fundamentals Collection
http://www.writers-exchange.com/3d-fiction-fundamentals-series/
https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/writing-reference-titles.html
Happy
writing!
Karen Wiesner
is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series. Visit
her here:
https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/
https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog
http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor
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