Tag: writing advice

How to Write 100,000 Words in a Month

100k Words in 31 days requires: ~3,226 words a day, every day. If you do that for a year, you’ve written 1,200,000 words.

So how do you plan for success, to hit 100k words in a single month?

The three factors are: Writing Speed, Writing Time, and Planning.

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WRITING SPEED

To maintain a decent speed, I know ahead of time what scenes I am writing and what needs to happen. I use a timer to do nothing but focus on writing for 30-minute bursts, so I do my best to stay in the zone and let the words spill and tell the story.

What to do: Find your writing speed. Write solidly for a length of time (ex. 30-minute bursts) and figure out how many words you are actually writing per hour. That will be important to decide how much time you need to set aside every day to write.

WRITING TIME

More than speed, writing time is likely the most influential factor to word count. You have to have the time to set aside to achieve an average of over 3,000 words. Let’s assume you can really focus and get out 1,000 words in half an hour. 90 minutes is going to be almost in the zone. If you write slower, you’re looking at two.

If you do happen to write slower than this, daily writing is daily practice. You will get faster. If you measure your speed daily, you’ll see it.

Dedicating your time to writing might feel like a chore at times, but the payoff makes it all worthwhile. Think of what you can do with 100,000 words in a month as a writer: 1-2 novels, OR 5 20k novellas (perfect for serials), OR 10 10k short stories, AND for you short-short story writers, a potential of 20 5k length stories.

What to do: Take your writing speed and multiply it by the number of days in the month to see what you will accomplish. If you aren’t going to write every day, take that into account. Knowing what you can accomplish if you make the time is a great motivator to getting started on those days you don’t want to. But we’re chasing 100k words, right? You need to average that 3,200 words a day. How long is that going to take you?

PLANNING

I put planning last, though you need to know your projects before you even start. I have it last because Writing Speed and Time decide what you’re going to accomplish for the month. Planning also takes into account your goals. Use loose outlines to track your scenes. Keep a list of projects that you want to release within a certain time frame and a list of potential projects for the future.

What to do: Take a look at how many words you think you will write and decide what you’re going to write for the month, what you want to accomplish. This will help you maintain your momentum after each project. Always be ready to move on to the next book.

 

Note: This is a rewrite of an older blog post, making it less about my own writing and more about technique).

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My Favorite Point of Views

MY FAVORITE POINT OF VIEWS

My favorite Point of Views are First Person Present Tense, First Person Past Tense, Third Person Present Tense.

For First Person Present Tense, I’d originally used this POV because I thought it read better with romances that I was writing under a pen name.  I find it works very well for getting inside the head of one or two individuals through the entire book, allowing the reader to experience the emotions simultaneously with the character. I haven’t used this POV for any of my G.S. Wright novels.

First Person Past Tense at times reads like a journal. You’re hearing the story from the character in their own words. It contains all of their biases and emotions. It drops the reader into the story, while being therapeutic for the character. The character only knows the story from their perspective. I used this POV for Soul Sister, and it remains my most emotionally charged book to date. I’m revisiting this POV for the book I’m writing this week.

Third Person Present Tense is another POV that I enjoy using for books with a more romance-oriented twist. The book I’ve been working on for the past few months, and nearing release, is in this POV. I chose it because the book was originally more of a Romance in nature, but eventually also gravitated into the Horror genre. It takes the reader along for the ride with characters in real time, like watching the event unfold. I found it works equally well whether Romance or Horror.

Though in the past I used Third Person Past Tense, I’ve found myself drifting away from it. All of my older titles, Broken Things, the Hungry Gods series, the Apocalypse Witch trilogy, and the Spilling Blood Serial all fall into this POV. In the future, I am currently planning to use it less. It’s where I started, it tells a good story, but I find for me the other three POV’s work better for my voice, and what I want my story to sound like.

I’m not talking about the other POV’s. I don’t use them.

When you’re not 100% comfortable with your writing, when you find your tense shifting within your book (past and present tense jumping back and forth), pay attention to what your story is trying to tell you. You might find that you think you want to write in one POV, but the story wants to be told in another.

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