A Novel A Year

When I talked about turning nuggets into ingots, I said that the best way to start a great work is to write a small amount. Shortly after that, one of my writer friends shared an interesting bit of advice she heard.

If you write one page every day, then you are writing 365 pages a year. That happens to equate to a medium-sized novel. This means that You can write a novel a year, even when keeping a fairly minimum writing schedule.

Now, in reality, there is more to a novel than the mere writing of it. At the very least, there is revising and editing to be done. And if you want that novel to be published, that is a whole process unto itself. But that's not really the point here.

The point is writing. A novel a year sounds like a tremendous feat. A page a day sounds pathetically simple. But they are the same thing. It may be easier to write 365 unrelated pages a year than it is to write a good novel, but that depends on you. For one thing, once your characters start taking charge and your story falls in place, you should find yourself getting ahead of schedule.

Try writing a page a day. It's a manageable minimum rate, leaves plenty of room to work ahead, but really adds up in a short time.