160: How I Wrote a Book in 30 Days

 

I wrote a rough draft of a new novel in 30 days, and I want to break down how I did it, what helped me be successful, and the big takeaways for all new writers. 

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HOW I WROTE A BOOK IN 30 DAYS

Hi friends, welcome back to your big creative life. We are recording from the floor again another episode. I just recorded an episode about the TikTo ban, and I got real role riled up about it, because it sucks, and I'm not going to rehash everything Isaid on this episode, because we're talking about something different, but it just sucks, and I feel like it's really had an impact on me over the last 24 hours. I'm recording this after pretty soon after the ruling that upheld the ban was announced, it's been a it's been a roller coaster, and I've been trying to finish editing my book, and in fact, I set yesterday as my deadline to edit my book that I wrote in 30 days. And that did not happen because of being busy with client work and then just reeling from the news and kind of going into a doomsday mindset about my business and the writing community, and just, I don't know, being sad about it.

 

But anyways, I think I'm gonna finish I think I'm gonna give myself two more days. I'm recording this on a Saturday. Actually, I'm having to work today to catch up. I have a bit of client editing to do. And then decided to record some podcast episodes also. And I think I'm gonna give myself to the end of the day Monday to finish it. I really want to get it done soon and sent off to my agent, because I don't want to wait till after the holidays. I just want to be done. But okay, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I recently wrote a book, and I wanted to do an episode talking about the process, because I wrote a book in 30 days, which is absolutely bat shit crazy, and I want to talk about it, because I approach the process of writing this book very differently than I have ever written anything else. Like I approach the process of writing everything a bit differently, but this was very,very different.

 

So I'll just share how I kind of set this up, why I decided to do this, how I did it, how Iactually wrote the first draft in 30 days, and what I learned from the process. So quick disclaimer, I could, I'm only doing this, and I only was able to do this because it's not my first book. If you're new to following me, I don't have a published book yet. I'm I'm pursuing traditional publishing, traditional publication. I have a literary agent, and I've written two books, neither of them are published yet, and I wrote a third one that hopefully will be going on submission soon after we finish editing myagent and I finished editing it, and I only could do this because it was my third book. Part of writing a book in a really short amount of time is believing that you can do it. And if I were writing my first book, I wouldn't have that belief, because I wouldn't have known that I could even write a book at all, let alone do it in 30 days. And there was so much I didn't know when I was writing my first book, about characters, about pacing, about conflict, about story structure. And that's not a bad thing. It just means that I was a new writer.

 

And I always say that you learn how to write a book by writing a book. And so I just want to, I just want to put that out there that if you're a new writer, like you want to write a book, but you haven't started, or maybe you're in the process of writing your first book, and you feel some type of negative reaction when I say thatI wrote a book in 30 days. Please just know that this is insane, and it's also something that for me was only possible with my third book. So if it's taken you three years to write your book, that's fine. It's still progress. There's no don't feel any pressure about you, you know. Oh, she did it that way, so that means I should do it that way too. No, everybody's got their own process, but I do just want to share again what I learned in the process, because it was really interesting to to experience all of this.

 

So a little bit of background before the 30 days started. I came up with this idea for this book a couple of years ago. It's a thriller, and it involves a kind of, like a personal development coach, type of Guru guy who is holding a conference in Miami that takes place over five days. It's an annual conference that he has, and the book deals with some events that unfold over those five days. And I have three point of view characters, so two people attending the conference. And then his wife is the third point of view character. So we just get different glimpses into things that are going on. Someone winds up dead. It's very twisty. So that's the kind of the premise for the book. I need to figure out a like, cute, kind of quick social media way of pitching it, but I haven't done that yet.

 

As you can tell, the wayI describe it. It's not quick or cute at all. Anyways, so I cameup with this idea a couple of years ago. I don't remember exactly when it was. It might have been when I was stuck working on my last book. That's generally when new ideas come to me, but I'm not sure. And anyways, once I finished my last book,I was thinking about what to work on next, and I started writing this one. And it was probably, I mean, we were still in Nashville when I started writing it. So it probably was like, at least two years ago, and I remember I brought a chapter of it to my writing group, to my critique group. I might have even done that a couple of times to get feedback on it, so I know that it was I made some progress there, and  got about eight or 10,000 words in, and stopped because it just felt very difficult for me to write it. It felt like something wasn't working.

 

But yeah, I ended up setting it aside, and was like, I'll just figure all that out later. And earlier this year, I kept trying to come back to it, and I would write maybe 500 words, and then stop and itjust again. Something wasn't working. So when I say that I wrote a book in 30 days,it's not like I got the idea one day and then the next day just started writing. I had had some time to think about this. I'm not a massive outliner, so I never, I never created a full outline. I did try, at one point, actually, I used the W outline to try andpinpoint some plot points, but the plot points that I brainstormed when I did that didn't end up in the draft. I changed it because I had the characters going in directions that I just didn't like, I didn't think would work for the story. So, yeah, I've been thinking about this for a while. I had been per it had been percolating. I've been mulling over these characters.

 

I also, y'all have heard me agonize over this on the podcast, I could not, for the life of me, decide if I wanted to have two point of view characters or three, and if I wanted this guy whose conference it was to be a point of view character, or if I wanted it to be the people around him sharing their perspective. I couldn't decide. Couldn't decide. So I kept putting it off, and then I kept I just put the main script aside, because I'm like, Well, I can't make progress until I decide what I'm doing with this. So that was that, and it went through a couple different iterations, like I initially, when I brainstormed the idea for this, I had a different point of view, character completely, her perspective, her role, her relationships were very different than what they ended up being in this draft.

 

So that helped me when the 30 days started, because I already had spent a lot of brain power thinking about this story. Now I did not know how it ended. I did not know much about the arcs of these characters and what was going to happen to each of them. I just had some loose ideas. That's my process. I prefer to figure things, some things out in the beginning and get an idea of who the characters are,and then just start writing to see how things evolve from there. I ended up scrapping that. It might, have even I started writing it a couple times, and I might have even gotten to like 12 or 13,000 words with the initial draft before the 30 daysstarted. But I just, I just decided to scrap it and start over. I was able to kind of copy and paste and repurpose a little bit of what I wrote before, but most of it ended up being new.

 

So it felt like I was starting from scratch. I did not I knew I wasnot going to do NaNoWriMo this year because of the organization statement on generative AI specifically, and it just is not an organization I really want to support. And also, I was thinking about doing this in September, and I didn't want to wait. I didn't want to wait to start writing until November, so I was like, You know what? I'm not I'm not going to participate in it anyways. I'm not planning on doing it in November, sowhy don't I just start now? And I made the decision kind of quickly randomly, that I was going to do it in 30 days, and just figured, what the hell? And the other reason,I decided that is my second book, the thriller that I wrote, it was on submission last year, and we got some feedback from editors that there were just too many books about podcasts on the market.

 

My book deals with the podcast and so we pulled it, and I made some changes to it, and only one editor has seen that new version, but it has not been back out yet. And my agent's been going through some stuff this year for a number of reasons. Itjust it hasn't gone back out yet. And I kind of was feeling like, okay, things are just stalled again in my author career. I don't know if this book is going to go back out. I don't know when it's going to go back out. I don't know if we do send it out, it's going to be to a smaller round of publishers, and I can't control any of that, so let me, let me focus on what I can control, which is writing another book. So I decided,like, Fuck this. I'm tired of waiting. I'm just going to get this book ready. I already know the story loosely. I know that this is the next book because I talked to Molly about it, my agent about it.

 

We had a phone call at the end of September, and I told her the pitch for it, kind ofwhat I was working on, what I was thinking. And she's like, Yeah, sounds good. She offered to see she's like, if you want to send me the first 50 pages, you can, or just to give you feedback on the direction, but I told her I wanted to wait and send her a full draft, because, just because I wasn't totally sure yet where the story was going, I wanted to give myself an opportunity, opportunity to discover it a bit morethan what I had at the beginning. So anyways, and I said, Yeah, give me, give me two months. Give me two months. It won't take me too long, yeah. So I was like, Al right, I got hustle then, so decided to do it in 30 days.

 

Um, pretty quickly I realized, like, day 123, I started this in early October. Pretty quickly I realized that it was going to be very hard for me to find time to do this in my schedule. I've talked before about how getting the first draft out is difficult for me. I have a very kind of love hate relationship with it. As a writer, I love editing, like, once the draft is done, going back to shape it and tweak it and polish it. That'swhat I love about the writing process. But getting that first draft down is hard for me. So there's that challenge. There was also the challenge of I was sick multiple times. Audrey kept bringing home things from daycare. I just was constantly feelinglow energy. And I'm also busy with client work, and that has to come first. My clients have to come first. And so it just was difficult to find mental energy to be able to sit down and write, and I knew that I would have to do at least a little over 2000 words a day in order to get the first draft done.

 

 I decided that I was going to set like 65 to 70,000 as a rough word count goal for my first draft. I tend to write big bare bones on first draft anyway. So I knew I was going to go back in and add more, more description, more dialog, etc. So I figured that would put me closer to, you know, 85,000 let's say which is where a second draft maybe would, that would be a good range for me writing a thriller. So, yeah, that was my goal. So I knew that I'd have to write a little over 2000 words, and it was just very, it was very hard to do. And I'm like, Okay, I don't know if I can do this, and I had announced it on social media. I said, Hey, y'all like, I'm doing this. And I didn't that account, that bit of accountability and not wanting to go back, not that anyone would have really cared, people would have understood.

 

But I don't know, I just I didn't want to go back and say, Oh, just kidding. I'm not going to do that. So what I decided to do is to try dictating. I have worked with some coaching clients who have done this and found it very helpful in their process. And I just, I experimented with it a little bit in the past, but not really, and Iwasn't sure what app to use, or, I don't know, I just kind of put it to the side, because I think I just wasn't ready. And then this time, I'm like, Well, let me if it can help me get words out quickly. Let me try it. So I quickly found that this was going to be the way to help me get the draft out. I've talked a bit about this on a I think I talked about it in a Q and A episode last month, but what I would do, I did a lot of dictating in the car. So what I would do is I would get in my car, start it up, open upmy Gmail app on my phone, and then compose an email to myself, and press the record button like press the microphone so that I could dictate something, and it would type it out in an email.

 

That way I could drive, you know, I plugged my phone into my Bluetooth thing on the car, and I wasn't looking at my phone, I wasn't looking at the screen, and I could just talk I could just talk it out. It is challenging with dictating, because it's notperfect. It misses words, it misunderstands what you're saying. It leaves out punctuation. It's not. Formatted, so it's just a big, long block of text, but that's okay.And Audrey's daycare, my daughter's daycare, is kind of far away, and it depends on, you know, with traffic, it can sometimes be, I don't know, worst, absolute worst case, it's like an hour, but most days, it's like between 30 and 45 minutes. So I had that time in the car, going to get her and then bringing her home, where I wasn't doing anything really. It was listening to an audio book or a podcast or music. So I decided to use that as my time to write. I also went on walks, and I would dictate into my phone I had plugged my headphones in. I would talk it out and just do it that way. And what I did initially is after, like a day of writing.

 

So after I would finish for that day, maybe I'd get 2000 words, maybe I get 3000 words, whatever it is, I would copy and paste it over to my Word doc so I could see how many words it was. And then what I started doing initially is cleaning that up because I wanted to make it not, not I'm not, not actually editing it, like not editing the content, but more just cleaning up the grammar, making sure the word choice was right, making sure that it understood correctly what I was saying. But I realizedthat that was going to take a lot of time and energy, and I wanted to focus on just getting the draft out. So I scrapped that, and I decided, You know what? I'm just going to dictate, let the draft be messy, and then I'll go back at the end to clean everything up. So I just left it. I created a writing tracker as well.

 

This is a great tool I found when I'm doing a big push for writing. I created it on my Google Drive like itwas Google sheets that have the date, the number of words that I wrote that day, and then the total word count for my manuscript. And this is incredibly motivating to see, because it did not take long for it to really increase, for the word count to really increase. Right now I'm pulling up my uh, writing tracker because I want, I want to just give you some examples of of days that I had. Okay, so I started this October 2. Um, some days I wrote. I had a few days where I wrote zero words, I just didn't write it all. And then I had some days where I wrote 3000 1000 6000 4005 4500 2000 it's all over the place. Right. As I was getting close to the end, I could see the story coming together. There was one day, I think, where I didn't really write anything new.

 

I just took some time to brainstorm,because I was about halfway through, maybe alittle over halfway through, and I had to figure out what was happening in the second half. I had to figure out how the book was gonna end, because I didn't fully know that yet. So I took some time to do that, and then it felt like, Okay, now that Ihave the rest of it kind of loosely mapped out, then I can move forward. I'm lookingat okay. So I finished 11. Oh, shoot, it looks like I didn't update. It dang Okay. Well, October 31 No, I'm sorry. October 28 29th and 30th, I did not write at all. So I have three days towards the end where I was just in my head, I was feeling sick, and I did not write, and I very seriously considered quitting. I was at about 50,000 words at that point, and was like, I just don't think I can do it. I still have so much left to write. I don't think I can get this done in 30 days.

 

And I thought to myself, Okay, it'sstill amazing. You know, you could still take another couple of weeks, and you could get your draft out in six weeks. That's still pretty cool, to get a draft written insix weeks. I was, my deadline was on a Saturday at the end of the day, and Friday, I was dictating, I was writing, and something happened where I just I set aside some time to brainstorm and think about what was going to happen for the rest of the book. And I just was like, Okay,I know where things are going. I know how I want the I know what I want the last kind of big emotional climax scene to be. Let me just do it and see. And I dictated a ton. One day I wrote, I think it was I dictated 7000 words. One day I dictated, like11,000 words. That's the day that I don't have on here. I don't know if I just didn't update this. I really thought I did. Anyways, I got a shit ton done those, those last two days, because I was so close. I was so close to doing it.

 

And I finished Saturday night at like eight, 830 something like that. I copied my lastlittle bit over into the Word doc, and the final word count with everything dictatedeverything in there was like 67,000 words, which is pretty close to. Where I was hoping to be for my or no, that is really where I wanted to be, because I was thinking 65 to 70 for my first draft so that it worked, which which? I'm still shocked by. I'm still shocked that I did that. I am so happy that I dictated so much of this book and that I had the experience of doing it, because I don't think I would have tried it otherwise, if I hadn't done this 30 day push, dictating is going to be a huge part of my process, because it kind of just it takes pressure off, and if I'm feeling blocked and I don't want to sit down for an actual writing sprint, I can just do something else and dictate, you know, driving, obviously, I'm paying attention to the road, but it's a route that I drive every day. I don't really have to, like, pay tons of attention if I'm going for a walk, yes, of course, I'm paying attention in the sense that I'm aware of my surroundings, but I don't have to exert a ton of mental energyon the actual walk. I can just let my brain go.

 

So that's one of the biggest things I learned, is just the power of dictating. I'm sure that there are dictation apps out there, you know, that you could, that you could use. That's just, I just did email, Gmail. I found that worked well. And then I had a backup too, because I was sending the email to myself. The other thing I found very helpful is accountability. Posting about this on social media, having the writing tracker, letting people in my life know that this is what I was doing. I was doing something insane. Um, I've never done this. I've never written a book this quickly. That all helped. So if you're listening to this and you're like, okay, great, butI don't post on social media, or I don't want to post about this, that's fine. Just some form of fun, form of external accountability can be so helpful for us as writers. I knew that this was not going to be forever. Like that sounds so obvious, but I just have to say it, because when I was in the middle of it, it was like, oh, so I'm working on this so much.

 

This is so hard, but it was only for 30 days, and then it was going to be done, and then I could get to editing, which is what I love so and something interesting happened. After I got done with the draft, my plan was to set it aside for maybe a week and then start editing. But I needed more time. I felt not really burned out, but just a little bit mentally tired after getting the draft out. So my other suggestionis, if you do something like that, make sure to give yourself a break. And I always talk about taking breaks after you get the first draft out, before you start to edit. But I think in this case, it's very important, because that's a huge push. I did a very difficult thing in 30 days, and I needed to just give my brain a bit of a break. And I also found it was hard to get myself in those early weeks of November, it was hard to get myself to edit, which surprised me, because I like editing, but yeah, I just needed a break. So I did a little bit of editing, and then took, you know, we traveledfor Thanksgiving, so I didn't really work on it much over that week of Thanksgiving. And I've just been doing a lot this week.

 

And surprisingly, I mean, yes, the draft was,the draft was in rough shape in the in the sense of, it has to be cleaned up, the grammar, the punctuation, etc, because it's rough from dictating, but the story isn't too rough. I know that I have to go in. I still have a little bit of work left to do on two of my characters to flesh them out a bit more, because they do feel sort of onedimensional right now, but that's fine. And then I know that I have to go in and maybe add a bit more description in certain places, because I could tell as I was writing, I was just rushing through it, rushing through a scene that was actually pretty important, but I didn't worry too much about it. So if you're listening again, another takeaway for you, no matter if you're writing a draft in 30 days or three years whatever, just give yourself permission for it to be a foundation of your story, that you don't have to get everything right on the first draft.

 

And in fact, the way that I teach writing, the way I talk about writing, it's actually a good thing if you don't get it all right on the first draft. I'm very aware when I'm writing that my characters are going to need more work. My dialog is going to feel a little bit awkward. I'm going to go in and need to, kind of, like, punch up my pros a bit, like, it might just be very basic, like, they went into the room. He looked at her, he nodded. Everyone's nodding and sighing constantly in the first draft, and that's okay. I just want to get the story out. I just want to figure out what's happening. I want to figure out how these characters react to each other. I want tofigure out my twists, all of that needs to be on the page before I can do things like make my sentences better and make the dialog the word choices that my characters have like to make that better. So remember that if you're a new writer, it was okay to let it be messy.

 

Yeah, you're just figuring out the story. You know, even if you're someone who's a big outliner and you know you have all of your scenes or your chapters mapped out, there are still going to be things in your draft that surprise you, your charactersare going to do things you don't expect. The story might go in a direction you didn't anticipate. So you have to leave room for that and just let it be, and then you can come back and edit it. Now, if you if you edit as you go, meaning you stop at the end of every day, if you stop to look over what you wrote that day and polish it, then that's fine. That's definitely a way to write a book. I just don't recommend doing that, because I think it's more efficient and effective to get the first draft out before you go back to do editing. But again, I always say this as well, there's no one correct way to write a book.

 

So yeah, I think, like I said at the beginning, I'm gonna give myself a couple more days to edit. And the thing about my editing process with this book is it doesn't have to be as solid and tight as it would if I were self publishing or if I were querying, I know that my agent and I are going to do probably a few rounds of edits on this, so I don't want to send to her first draft. But I'm also not like agonizing over every single little thing, because I know that some things are going to change. I just want to get it to a point where it feels mostly there, pretty solid, and then I'm going to get feedback from her. So that's why I'm not I don't have to be as intense with my editing as if I were querying or publishing it myself. So I just want to put that out there too. Yeah, I guess that's kind of the deep dive of ofwriting a book in 30 days.

 

I definitely think going forward, like my next book, I will try this. I don't know if I'll do 30 days, but I'm definitely gonna do dictation like that is gonna be a part of my process, for sure, if you're someone who's busy, if you've got kids, if you've got a long commute, if you are just struggling to find time to write, I think dictating can really, really help when that microphone, it button is pressed, when it's recording what you're saying, you can take your time. You don't have to speak quickly. And you know, I think that's one thing I was worried about at the beginning, but sometimes I talked pretty slowly. And then sometimes, if I was more sure about my sentences or where things were going, you know, I would talk quicker.

 

So anyways, I need to think of a title for this book. I hate thinking of titles. Some writers have that as a strength, and I do not. Oh my gosh, I've been talking for 27 minutes. Okay, I'm gonna stop. If you have questions about my process, please let me know. Can DM me on Instagram? At what's my username? @KatieWolfWrites.I'm happy to talk about this process because I found it so fun and interesting and hard, yes, but yeah, I'm still, like I said, I'm still kind of in shock that I that I did that. But anyways, I hope you have a wonderful holidays. If you're listening to this kind of around the time that it comes out, we are not going to have a December Q and A episode on YouTube. It's just going to be a podcast episode, just a heads up.

 

So if you want to submit a question, I'll answer it on the podcast, you have until the third Tuesday of the month to do that, to submit the question, and then the episode will come out the fourth or, sorry, the last Tuesday of the month, which will be this month, make sure I have my dates right. December 31 that's when the Q and A episode will come out. So okay, I hope you have a wonderful holidays, like I said, and I will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for listening.

Katie Wolf