One Foot in front of the Other for Eighty-seven Days from James W. Ziskin

With thousands of new titles being published every day, what do you do to try to raise your new book above the fray and catch the eye of readers?  We may have had a similar question before but things change so fast these days that what worked yesterday may not work today. So any new thoughts on this?

This week’s question is a simple one. Simple because I’ve accepted that there’s not much more I can do to promote my books. Not without making friends and strangers sick of hearing about my books. So I carry on with a two-pronged strategy: 1. Share news of my writing periodically on social media and 2. Write the best books and stories I can.

With that answer out of the way, I’m going off script this week to talk about writing. I’m hoping that’s something people who read this blog are interested in. Specifically, I want to write about getting the words down on the page. The first draft. Let’s leave revision and craft for another day.

Stephen King said that it should take no more than three months to write a first draft. That’s one season of the year. Ninety days, give or take. While I’ve always aspired to achieve that goal, I’ve never quite managed it.

But I’ve been in lockdown at home for the past three months. More than ninety days now. I’ve gone out for walks and a few trips to the grocery store and pharmacy, but that’s about it. About twenty days into my self-quarantine, I realized I wasn’t making any progress on my new book. I won’t say it was a revelation. More of a growing awareness that finally became impossible to ignore. And I decided to get moving or risk wasting the one good thing the lockdown provided: time. There was nothing else pressing for me to do, aside from some household chores, cooking, laundry. Things like that. I didn’t even need to go out to shop. Everything was delivered to our door, so I had no excuses to avoid writing. 

My new novel, code name “The Monsoon Project,” is set in 1975 India, during the Emergency. Danny Jacobs, a young American journalist, arrives in Bombay for a new assignment and gets caught up in the chaos of the Emergency. His enigmatic expat neighbor, Willy Smets, is helpful and friendly. But Danny is smitten by Smets’s enchanting and clever Indian lover, Sushmita.

So, as I began the book in early March, I set up my usual spreadsheet to track my progress. I’ve found that the spreadsheet is the best tool to shame me into writing more, into meeting daily goals, into putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward day by day to finish a novel. And here it is.

It works like this. I monitor my progress and shame myself into doing more. In March, I got off to a good start on day one and two. But then things went south. Look at all those zeroes in the Words column. Don’t forget that I was in lockdown from March 13. No excuse for this. My lethargic effort hit rock bottom when my daily word average dropped to 172 words per day. My spreadsheet told me I had to make a change.

But change can come slowly. I managed to lift my daily average word count, but soon fell back into the bad habits as April began. By April 4th, I was one word ahead of the lowest point in my production. 

April turned out to be a very good month. Only one day without any writing. Again, the spreadsheet compelled me to write. Slowly, my daily production improved, and that improvement spurred me on to write more. Soon, I was writing more than a thousand words a day, then two thousand. My daily average rose from the low point of 172 words per day to 660. I managed 30,516 words in thirty days in April. Better, but not good enough for someone with nothing but time on his hands.

Then came May. I wanted to have the first draft done by June 1st, and a thousand or two words per day wasn’t going to get me there. Watching the numbers on my spreadsheet, I willed myself to do better.

Two thousand words per day became the norm. Then 3,000 or more. A bad day was 1,500. My daily average soared. Suddenly, thanks to my spreadsheet and the growing numbers I entered there, I was inspired to write more, even when I was tired and ready to turn in. I reached 4,145 words on May 16th. More than 3,600 the next day. The words started piling up and the end of the first draft was in sight.

I missed my self-imposed deadline of June 1st, but only by three days. In May, I wrote 73,572 words. That’s enough for a novel. Maybe not this one, but 73K is a lot of words. By the time June arrived, I’d improved my daily word count average from a low of 172 words per day to 1,300. Then in June, I added another thirty-one words per day and finished on a high.

There’s plenty of work left to do on this book. I typically revise eight to ten times before it’s ready. But you can’t revise what you haven’t written. So the first draft is a major achievement in the life of a book.

And, for me at least, writer’s block doesn’t exist. I know when I’m not writing, it’s out of laziness. It’s because the prospect of 400 plus blank pages is daunting. It’s hard work and, like Dorothy Parker, I love having written but writing itself? Not so much. Writing a book in ninety days is tough, but not impossible. I just did it. The key is to put words on the page. Day after day. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And, I’ve found, tracking every word every day is one of the best ways to push yourself to fill the pages. When you’re done, you can bask in the glow of having written. It’s a nice glow.

Try tracking your progress. If it doesn’t work, take it up with Stephen King.