I didn’t really have any idea of what the answer to any of those questions would be. Fortunately, I had a golden opportunity to find out. In August, I had a vacation of roughly two weeks and three days. I say roughly because I did have to do some things for work during that period. I decided to do a little test. I would set ambitious writing goals for the period, and then see how well I met those goals. I asked myself "how much writing should a writer do in two and a half weeks?" I didn’t really have an answer to that. I recalled reading that Steve Stirling sometimes hit eight thousand to ten thousand words in a day when he was writing Island in the Sea of Time, but I got the impression that was an exceptionally good day for him. I recalled that Arthur Dent (the guy that wrote most of the Doc Savage novels) used to write one of those 120 to 130 page short novels pretty much every month for over ten years. I used that to set my goal.

I figured that Dent probably plotted for about a week, wrote for two-and-a-half weeks, and then polished for a week. I figured that the Doc Savage novels probably ran about thirty to thirty-five thousand words. I set a goal of thirty-two thousand words in two-and-a-half weeks. I worked backwards from that, and came up with daily goals of 2500 words on weekdays, and 1000 words on Saturdays. I figured I’d take a break on Sundays to try to regain my sanity.

I plotted out a novel that I estimated would be 70,000 to 75,000 words long over the weeks leading up to my vacation. I figured out the major characters. I sketched out what would happen and when. I even jumped the gun and wrote around 800 words on the story. Finally the vacation started. Here is an almost day-by-day account.

August 6 (Tuesday): I got off to a truly awful start. I logged on to read my e-mail and ended up spending several hours surfing the Internet. I also had to spend about an hour and a half doing stuff for work. Bottom line: I wrote 818 words—32.72 percent of what I intended to. Moral: Internet can eat your writing.

August 7 (Wednesday): Much better day. I got an early start and wrote 2612 words. That was 104.48 percent of goal. Rolling total: 3430 written, goal 5000. Over the two days I was at 68.6 percent of goal.

August 8 (Thursday): We started a brief family vacation at Green Lake. I had warned my wife that I would be spending a lot of time writing, which was fine with her because she wanted to do some craft things with my daughter. I had set a goal of 1000 words because of the four-hour drive. I only wrote 312 words—just too tired from the drive. Bottom line 32.1 percent for the day, and 62.52 percent so far.

August 9 (Friday): Pretty good day. Wrote 2439 words, 97.56 percent of goal. Overall: 72.82 percent of goal so far.

August 10 (Saturday): I set a goal of 2500 words for this Saturday because I had only intended to write 1000 words on Thursday. I didn’t make the 2500, but I did write 1938 words, 77.52 percent of goal. Main downfall: I got sucked into Jurassic Park III, which my daughter was watching. Overall I was at 73.89 percent of goal.

Looking back at the first week: So far I had written a little over 8100 words since I started the test. That’s a little under 14 pages single-spaced so far—probably equivalent to about 30 pages of that Doc Savage novel. Not bad, but nowhere near what I intended. I was behind by almost 3000 words so far.

August 12 (Monday): My wife presented me with a “Honey Do” list—things that really did need doing around the house, like scraping and painting the front porch. I would spend four to six hours per day over the next four days getting the “Honey Do” list done. I still managed to write 2488 words, 99.52 percent of goal. Overall I was up to 78.64 percent of goal.

August 13 (Tuesday): Still working on the “Honey Do” list, but I still managed 2361 words, 94.44 percent of goal, boosting the overall percent to 81.11 percent.

What you’ll be seeing in this issue of the newsletter is my output through  August 13th—a little under 10,000 words.

August 14 and August 15: 2475 and 2105 respectively, bringing me up to 83.6 percent overall

August 16 (Friday): Took my daughter to see an aunt and uncle. Did no writing. Overall percent down to 74.11

August 17(Saturday): More “Honey Do” stuff. Managed to squeeze in 599 words. That brings me down to 74.11 percent. I then cheated and did 562 words on Sunday, which brought me up to 76.4 percent.

Looking back at the week: I had now written 18,718 words since I started the test. My goal was to write 24,500 words by this point. I was nearly 6000 words behind my goal. On the other hand, I had written over 30 single-spaced pages of fiction in two weeks—the equivalent of roughly 60 pages of that Doc Savage novel.

The last three days: This was by far my best work time. I hit a record 3301 words on Monday, dipped to 2068 on Tuesday (Daughter suckered me into “just one” game of Street Fighter—2 hours later I managed to get back to work). I got back up to 2530 on Wednesday.

Looking back at the two and a half weeks: I wrote a total of 26,617 words. That’s not a novel—not even a tiny Doc Savage one. It is over a third of a real novel though. It’s very roughly 45 single-spaced pages—enough for a clear-cut most issues of POD.

Back to the real world: I set goals for when I had to do back to the real world—on average 750 words per day on weekdays and 1000 words on Saturday. My writing pace has been more erratic since I went back to work, but overall I’ve maintained about 80% of my goals. I finished the rough draft of the novel in early October.  Unfortunately, it was about twenty-thousand words shorter than I had intended for it to be--an unsellable fifty-four thousand words (the minimum for a novel is sixty thousand words these days I'm told).

Some thoughts: Setting the goals and keeping statistics about how I actually did took some time, but it did motivate me a lot. I wanted to reach my target number of words and generally worked hard to do it. There isn’t any way to measure quality though, so that remains to be seen. What I wrote was rough draft, not a finished product. After I write a rough draft I generally go through two more times. The first time I try to cut the word count and get rid of poorly written sections. The second time through I analyze scenes and try to figure out ways of making them more vivid. To me, the rough draft is like the first full run-through of a play. The gist of the story is there, but the subtleties of character emotions aren’t there yet. The scenery is still a little sketchy too.

How good is the story? The plot borrows some elements from several other stories I’ve written over the years. POD members will recognize those elements. People outside of POD probably won’t. I wrote over 70 pages of notes on characters and the plot before I started actually writing the story. That helped, but I’m still finding that some sections just don’t work as I originally wanted them to.

Did the time pressure mean that I wrote a poorer story than I otherwise would have? That’s hard for me to say. This is probably not the best story I’ve written so far. I don’t think it’s the worst either. As I mentioned it did end up considerably shorter than I intended it to—probably in the unsellable  55,000-word range. Some subplots could use a little more exploration, so I may need to do some additional plotting work.

What does this say about me and full-time writing? Well,  I did learn some things.

• Time that you spend at home is subject to a lot of distractions. The Internet is a time sink. So is the television. My wife would never have dreamed of intruding on work with the “Honey Do” list, but she saw no problem with intruding on writing time. I don’t resent that, because the stuff really did need to get done, but that’s a consideration.
• Setting goals really does help me. I didn’t meet them all of the time, but I’m sure I would have written a fraction of what I actually wrote without them to motivate me.
• For me, self-discipline is a finite resource. I exercised a lot of self-discipline on the writing, but I became less disciplined in other areas. Diet and exercise went out the window, and I think I spent more money than I normally would have. If I got into the rhythm of writing, I might be able to make the discipline in other areas happen too, but not all at once. I know that I have enough self-discipline to do a lot of writing in a short time. I don’t know if I would have the self-discipline to continue that over the long-haul.
• Time spent writing does come out of other things. My daughter is eleven now. That’s a good age, and when it is gone it is gone. I have some regrets about not spending more time with her over the two weeks+ of my little experiment. I also have some regrets about not getting out in our all-too-brief Midwestern summer more. These two weeks+ were perfect outdoor weather—good for hikes, bike rides, and showing my daughter how to play various sports. Oh well. Life is a series of trade-offs, always.
•  I found myself averaging around 400 words per hour. That increased gradually over the period, starting out closer to 300 words an hour and gradually increasing to closer to 500 words per hour. I think that if I did this sort of thing full time all of the time I could push the words per day up to a pretty consistent 3000 to 4000 words per day. That would give me the rough draft of a novel in maybe 4 weeks from the time I got done plotting. Would it be a novel worth publishing? I don’t know. The one I’m currently writing leverages off of a lot of previous thinking and plotting. I don’t have a huge stock of novels waiting in my head to be written.

I decided to include roughly one-third of the portion of the story I wrote during the experiment in this newsletter. Unfortunately, I won't be able to include the rest of the story on-line because it would make the novel essentially unsellable to book publishers should I decide to polish it up and try to sell it.

I’m very interested in your opinions on how this compares to my earlier efforts. Did the rush affect quality? If so, what kinds of difference did you see and how significant were they?  Does the story grab you?  Do you want more?