You Can Write A Novel

I'm trying an experiment this month and you are my unwilling subject. Well, ok, the blog is my unwilling subject and you are reading it. I wrote about why I blog a little bit back, but this month I'm going overboard. You see there was NPR story about writing a novel. The premises was that you can right a novel in November even with your job, kids, and everything else. It's easy. All you need to do is write 3000 words a day and at the end of the month you will have a novel.

 

So a bunch of NPR listeners were inspired and actually did this. Now these weren't professional writers. They were just ordinary people like you and me. Well, I actually put myself well below normal when it comes to writing. I hate writing. I was paranoid of writing in college so much that I completely designed my class schedule around minimizing writing classes. I took music as a minor to fulfill requirements because it didn't involve writing. And, of course, my major was computer science which pretty much only involved writing code (MMMmmm... code). After my freshman year when I had no control over my courses, I managed to get away with only writing two essays over one page in length.

 

Although I didn't realize it at the time, this was a big mistake in my life. Writing is really important. Every good job involves writing. Writing is a very important skill to advance your career. If I have a good idea at work that I want to get implemented, I need to convince other people that it's a good idea. If I were a full time game designer, this would be the most important job skill. Being creative, intelligent, and diligent would all take second place to communicate skills as a designer. This is little less true for programmers, but communication skills are definitely one of the things that differentiates the best from the worst. And writing is a very important communication skill. Ok, back to my NPR story...

 

So after a month a lot of these people had novels. Now I suspect these weren't good novels but many of them had a very interesting thing to say about the experiment. The first week was difficult and it took them a long time to write 3000 words. After about 7 days though it started to quickly get easier for them. And by the end it was a quick and enjoyable activity. One person said he'd get up and write in the morning before the day really started. Once he got in the habit of doing this it got really easy.

 

So this month I'm doing a very similar thing, but I'm setting the bar way lower. I'm writing a 500 word blog everyday. Today is day four. I'm recording my time to see if I improve. I'm actually amazed at how soon my writing has gotten faster. He's my track record so far:

 

2/1: 150+ minutes. 701 words. 4.6 words/min.
2/2: 70 minutes. 504 words. 7.2 words/min.
2/3: 67 minutes. 615 words. 9.2 words/min.
2/4: I'll fill this in just before I'm done... 37 minutes. 579 words. 15.6 words/min. Wow!

 

I think that's pretty amazing. Each day I get up and make coffee then head off to my office to write a blog before work. And each day so far it's gotten faster and more enjoyable. I'm shooting for 20 words / minute by the time I'm done. Wish me luck.