Have you ever wanted to draft a novel in three days? In a post on Writer Unboxed, Greer Macallister offers her advice on getting your first draft down in a long weekend.
This is apparently a thing now.
To complete a draft of a short novel in three days, your writing pace needs to hit about 1,000 words per hour over a 16 -17 hour day, or about 10 times the pace of an average National Novel Writing Month novel. “The fast first draft isn’t for everyone, and the three-day novel definitely isn’t,” Macallister says. “But as a writer who loves to pour on the speed when circumstances allow, and someone who produces an insanely messy first draft even when I take my time and write slowly, I find that setting a blistering pace is absolutely the best way for me to get a big chunk of that first draft on the page.”
Do you want to try it? Here are Macallister’s top three tips:
- Set goals, but don’t obsess. While it makes sense to break down your 50k draft into smaller, manageable chucks – with deadlines – don’t obsess about hitting those goals exactly. Even if you don’t manage to draft 50,000 words in three days, you’re still likely to end the long weekend with a huge amount of draft writing. Go, you!
- Generate without judgment, but don’t cheat. Don’t stop to edit while you draft, as that will only slow you down. Get the words down first and then rearrange and cut or rewrite later. Don’t delete writing that you think you’ll cut later. Save that for Day 4. However, Macallister also recommends that you don’t cheat. Don’t describe every setting in minute detail simply to get your word count up. Don’t give a character a name with 10 words and use it in full every time you enters the stage (a classic NANO move!). Don’t copy/paste your research into your draft, even if you would do that during your normal course of writing.
- Start early, but don’t start from scratch. Many of us have no problem writing 1,000 words an hour when we are in the very early stages of drafting a project. We have lots of ideas to get down or perhaps a list of scene outlines, so we can jump from one to another if we get stuck. However, Mcallister says this approach works best if you already have the contours of your novel in mind – the characters, setting, and basic plot arc. If you start your three-day weekend without a solid path, you might flounder at the mid-point. However, if you’ve already deep into the drafting process and focused on polished writing, the fast draft approach isn’t for you.
