Andrew Mayne - How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours: And other questionable & possibly insane advice on creativity for writers

F irst off , let's discuss what I mean by a book. I'm not talking about writing the next Game of Thrones opus. Although it would be wonderful if GRR could pick up the pace just a little bit...

When I say "book" I mean a novella. What's a novella? According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a novella is anything from 17,500 words to 40,000. Whereas a novel is anything over 40,000. What kind of books fall under the novella category? Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, George Orwell's Animal Farm, all of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books, lots of Stephen King stories, including Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption IMDB's best rated movie of all time, Shawshank Redemption, is based on. Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and so on.

My point is there are lots of great books that fall under the category of "novella." And quite a few have made great movies. There would probably be a great deal more if the logistics of publishing were more friendly towards that medium. But guess what? In the age of the Kindle, those rules don't apply. There's been a renaissance of the novella thanks to ebooks.

What's also great about this size is that for a dedicated human being, you can write something like this in one or two sittings. As an experiment, fresh off finishing a novel, I was eager to write a shorter book and committed myself to writing a novella in 24 hours.

I decided to try writing a novella in 24 hours because I was afraid I was becoming complacent in my writing. My first year of writing (and making money doing it) I wrote something like 8 or 10 books. Since then I got a little lazy. Granted, I did things like make a television show, but still, I watched myself take longer and longer to write and develop some bad habits.

After taking an egregiously long time to finish one book (3 months which is an eternity for me), I sat down and made note of all the things that went wrong. The book I wrote after that came together in a fun two weeks of writing that never felt forced.

Right after I finished, I made note of everything that worked and how I was in the "zone." This all took place at an In-N-Out Burger where I was celebrating the completion of the novel. While sitting there I had an idea for a cool story and put it aside for a moment. I was focused on my average word count and realized that it was about 4,000 a day on the novel. Some days I did 10,000, but mostly it was around 2,000 to 4,000 words. While eating my animal-style fries I remembered how during my first year of writing I once did 17,000 words in one day words that ended up in my book The Chronological Man: The Monster in the Mist, a series that I get just as many people pestering me for more sequels as anything else I've ever done (Including Jessica Blackwood books).

Could I write that many words in a day again or was that just a fleeting experience that happened out of boredom and desperation?

I suddenly realized that the story in the back of my head (a kind of horror adventure) would make a perfect novella one that I could wrap up in 17,500 words (or so.)

I went home, and instead of lounging around for a few days patting myself on the back for finishing the other book, I made a little one-page outline and went to work. I wrote from 5 pm to about 3 AM passing my 17,000 earlier record that evening when I counted what I'd done in the last 24 hours on the other book. I went to sleep and then got back up around 8:30 AM and jumped back behind the keyboard. I finished at 4:45 PM, less than 24 hours later, with a word count of 20,053. I'd written an entire novella an honest to goodness book in less than a day.