Writing a novel in a month: what a November sprint is good for

Every November a great many writers try the same odd thing: a whole novel draft in thirty days. The usual target is 50,000 words, which works out to about 1,667 words a day if you write every day of the month. It is a long-standing tradition by now, carried on in libraries, kitchen tables, online threads and cafes with good outlets, and it has produced a lot of finished drafts that would otherwise have stayed as notes.

I like the tradition. I also think it is easy to ask the wrong thing of it. A month of fast drafting is very good at some jobs and quite bad at others, and knowing which is which before you start will save you a sour December.

The arithmetic, honestly

Fifty thousand words divided by thirty days is 1,666 and two thirds, so the number people quote is 1,667. That figure assumes you never miss a day. Most people do. Lose four days to work, family or a cold and the daily figure for the remaining days rises to about 1,923. Lose a whole week and you are looking at roughly 2,174 a day for the rest of the month.

At a steady pace, 1,667 words is somewhere between one and two and a half hours of drafting for most people, depending on how fast you type and how much you stop to think. That is a real commitment on top of a job. It is not impossible. It is also not a pace most writers can or should keep up all year.

The other honest number: 50,000 words is short for a literary novel. Plenty of fine novels are that length or shorter, but most adult literary fiction runs longer, and a November draft is usually a partial book, a compressed book, or a book with large holes marked "write this later." That is fine, as long as you know it going in.

What a month sprint is good for

The first column is the reason to do it. Most stalled novels stall because the writer keeps returning to chapter one, fixing it, and never learns what happens in chapter twelve. A month with a public target forces you forward. You discover your characters by watching them act, which is faster than thinking about them.

The second column is where the disappointment comes from. A sprint draft is loud, repetitive and lumpy. Characters change names halfway. Whole subplots appear on day nineteen and vanish on day twenty-three. If you expect a book, you will be disappointed. If you expect a quarry, you will be pleased.

Planning versus discovery writing

Writers split roughly into those who plan before drafting and those who find the story by writing it. Both can do a month sprint. They need different kinds of preparation.

If you plan

Do the planning in October, not on November 1. A useful plan for a sprint is short: a one-page summary of the story, a list of perhaps thirty to forty scenes in order, each in a single line, and a paragraph on each main character's want and fear. You do not need more than that. A plan of eighty pages tends to become a second book you feel obliged to obey.

The danger for planners is the day the plan stops working. It will happen, usually around the second week, when a character refuses to do what line seventeen says. Let them. Note the change at the top of the next session and keep going.

If you discover

Discovery writers need fewer notes and more fuel. Before the month starts, collect a page of things you might use: three or four situations, a setting you know well, an object that matters to someone, a conflict between two people who love each other. When you get stuck in the middle of the month you can reach into that page instead of staring at the cursor.

The danger for discovery writers is the long wander. Day after day of scenes that are lively but go nowhere. A simple guard: every Sunday, write two sentences on what the book seems to be about now. If the two sentences change every week, that is normal. If you cannot write them at all, pick a direction and commit to it for seven days.

A middle way

Many writers do best with a destination and no route. Know your ending scene (or a guess at it) and write toward it. That is enough structure to stop the wander and loose enough to leave room for surprise. Our piece on finishing the first draft when the middle sags makes the case for drafting the ending early, and a sprint is a good time to try it.

A worked example: one invented month

To make this concrete, here is an invented writer working on an invented novel. Neither exists. The book is called The Salt Ledger: a woman inherits her late uncle's failing ferry business on a lake island and finds his accounts do not add up.

In week one she plans lightly: a summary paragraph, twenty scene lines, an ending in which she sells the ferry to the person who cheated her uncle. She writes 13,100 words. Two scenes come out far longer than planned because the island turns out to be more interesting than the ledger.

In week two she misses a Tuesday and a Wednesday, and her daily target for the rest of the month rises to about 1,750. She writes a long scene in the ferry office that she suspects is the heart of the book, and a dull one about a bank meeting that she brackets with a note: [make this a phone call?]. Running total: 24,600.

In week three the plan breaks. Her uncle's old deckhand, a minor character in the outline, starts carrying the book. She does not stop to replan. She writes a two-line note at the top of the file ("Deckhand knows. Ledger is his handwriting.") and keeps going. Running total: 37,900.

In week four she writes the ending, then three scenes that should come before it, then a scene from the uncle's point of view that she is not sure belongs. She passes 50,000 words on day twenty-nine with about a third of the story still a list of bracketed notes.

What she has is not a novel. It is a long, honest map of one: a strong first act, a middle that changed direction, an ending that may be wrong, and one character she did not know existed on November 1. That is a very good month.

Habits that help during the sprint

• Stop mid-sentence at the end of each session. It is far easier to start a sentence you already know.
• Do not reread yesterday's work in full. Read the last paragraph and go.
• Use brackets for anything you would normally stop to fix: [name?], [check date], [this scene is boring, cut later].
• Keep one running note file for changes of mind, so you are not tempted to go back and correct earlier chapters.
• Count words once a day, at the end, not every ten minutes.
• Protect sleep. A tired writer keeps the count up for a week and then collapses for four days.

What to do with the draft in December

The worst thing to do with a November draft is to start polishing chapter one on December 1. The second worst thing is to send it to anyone.

Let it rest

Put it away for at least two weeks, longer if you can bear it. You need to forget what you meant so you can see what you wrote. December is a busy month for most people anyway, which makes this easier than it sounds.

Read it once, quickly, with a pen

When you come back, read the whole thing in two or three sittings without fixing anything. Make notes in the margin: where you were bored, where you were moved, where you were lost. Then write one page on what the book is about now, which is often different from what you planned.

Decide what kind of draft you have

Most sprint drafts fall into one of three types:

1. A real first draft: the story holds together from start to finish, even if badly written. Move to structural revision.
2. A discovery draft: you found the book, but it is not this book yet. Keep the best scenes and the new characters, and plan a second draft from scratch, using the first as notes.
3. A practice draft: the idea did not hold. You still have a month of habit, a real sense of your pace and probably three scenes worth saving in a separate file. That is not a failure.

For the first two types, our guide to revising a novel in passes sets out an order of work that starts with structure and saves sentences for later. A sprint draft needs that order more than most, because its sentences are the least finished thing about it.

Choose a slower pace for the new year

Do not try to keep up 1,667 words a day after November. Pick a target you can hit on your worst weekday, perhaps 300 to 500 words or a fixed hour, and protect it. The sprint shows you can write fast. The months after it show whether you can keep writing, and that is the skill that finishes books.

Questions readers ask

Do the words have to be in order?

No. Write the scenes you can see. Many sprint writers draft out of order and stitch later, and the stitching becomes part of revision.

Do notes and outlines count toward the 50,000?

That is your call, since the target is yours. I count only prose that could, after revision, sit in the book. Notes are useful, but counting them makes the total flatter you.

Is it worth doing if I already have a half-finished draft?

Yes, if you use the month to finish that draft instead of starting a new one. Fifty thousand words added to an existing book is often what carries it to the end.

What if I fall far behind?

Lower the target and keep the habit. Thirty thousand words written daily teaches you more than 50,000 written in a panic over the last weekend. More of the same thinking lives on the drafting shelf.