Dean Wesley Smith - How to Write a Novel in Half a Month: A WMG Writer’s Guide

I have done numbers of these writing books, basically just showing in public (meaning on my blog) what it is like to write a novel in a certain amount of time.

And then I turn the daily blog posts into chapters in the book and put the book out so anyone can read it and follow along. Actually see what it is like for a professional writer to write a book fairly quickly and in final form.

The reason for doing this is because so many writers believe in the myths that writing novels should take a long time, that it must be difficult, and that you must rewrite whatever you have done until it is mush and no one wants to read it.

I write a single draft, with some cycling every so often, so that when I get to the end, I need to have it checked for typos and then off it goes into print.

So one of these fun adventures I wrote a novel in five days while traveling. I was on a guys trip to play poker in Las Vegas. So why not write a novel along the way? And I did.

I have done novels in public in seven days and in ten days. Almost all of my novels are in the 40,000 plus word range that I have done in public. One, however, was an 80,000 word novel in twelve days that I was doing for a traditional New York publisher, the last one I ever did as a ghost writer.

This book done in a half month was while I was basically working a full-time job with the teaching and publishing and business stuff. In fact, one of the weeks I worked over sixty hours on other things besides writing.

It was a busy time.

So each chapter from here on out is a blog that is still on my website. Including the prologue. I would suggest you just follow the writing process along and when you find yourself thinking you could never do this or that, stop and check in with yourself. All of this I relay here is possible for a 70-yearold man like me, so it clearly is possible for you.

Enjoy.

Dean

Decided to do it. Write a novel in public again, detailing it out in blog posts every night. Totally insane, but great fun, which is why I am doing this.

The last few days were interesting. The more I looked at the next ten to twelve days, and looked at deadlines, and publishing and other writing projects I will be doing, the more I realized how much I had to do. So the sane thing would be to just push off trying to do a novel quickly and in public. Ive failed a number of times trying this because of scheduling issues the first year I was here in Las Vegas. But those issues are gone now.

Now I am writing fine, just stupidly busy with other projects.

But even being normally busy, I still pretty much write every day, so I figured why not give this a try again? Just add a push with a deadline and track every detail.

I am going to start tomorrow, February 18th, 2021.

I will detail out my day here with one post per day, but will add to it as the day goes on, keeping track of exact time, what I am doing in general, and the number of words done. I will even tell you if I take a nap. I will do a summary of the word count at the end of each day.

I am shooting for twelve days instead of ten, but will be happy with a half a month. And a 40,000 plus word novel. Twelve days will give my eye a better rest with all the other work I am doing as well. However, I think I will call this blog series Writing a Novel in Half a Month.

I could (in the old days before I lost one eye) do a novel of this length in about four days. Ten thousand words a day was not unusual for me. And I could still do that if I cleared the decks and really was careful with screen time. But I want to maintain my normal life with this book, get lots of sleep, do all the other projects and meet other deadlines. So twelve days is sane for me at this point.

And I will be writing at a pace most could manage, even with a day job. Stay tuned, you will see how that will work.

Besides, twelve days works out to about two novels a month, which is why the title. And with blogs and introductions, which I count, doing this will take me over 100,000 words easy in February. Closer to 120,000 actually, so a decent amount.

I will not talk about the actual book itself or even the genre or title of it. I never do that when writing anything and wont start now. So please dont ask. This is just about time management and producing words. The book will be called The book. You know, like beginning writers call the thing they have been working on for years.

So I am finishing this prologue at 1:35 a.m. on Thursday, February 18th. After a good nights sleep, I will be back with a post starting Day #1 after my first session here.

I will be returning here numbers of times during the day to update this chapter. That way I dont miss anything along the way. At least I hope I dont.

Also, I will be able to talk about my moods, what I am thinking about something. Much better than trying to recreate the entire day at the end, when I am tired. So onward with this.

Day One, Entry One

11:10 a.m. Rolled out of bed just about at my normal time these days, and with my breakfast bar made it to my internet computer around noon. I worked on email for a while, then spent some time organizing my to-do list of projects that need to be done while I am writing this book. A lot of them. Yikes.

I then spent about thirty minutes on doing a few workshop things before finally at 1:37 taking a break to go put on my glasses and stare out over the city. That is what I do to rest my eye.

I also had on the feed for the Mars rover landing and kept switching over to it, listening to it, and then cheering when it landed and sent back the first photo. How amazing that is!!!!

1:50 p.m. Got back into my office and instead of going forward with more internet and email stuff, I decided to go to the writing computer. Not something I would have done at this point without this challenge, so thats an interesting point.

I spent a few minutes setting up the Word Doc file, then just started typing and ended up with 475 words on the book before I stopped. The reason I stopped even before my first cycle back through those words is that Kris will be back from our office downstairs shortly to have lunch and I wanted to do this first entry.

So it is now 2:35 p.m. and I have had a productive hour-and-a-half. Email caught up, a couple of Portals Collection class assignments sent back (I finished reading the stories for those last night), some workshop stuff done, and the novel started. Total win starting off.

Back with another entry later today.

Day One, Entry Two

3:45 p.m. Got back from lunch. I had some vegan pulled pork with BBQ sauce, two hardboiled eggs, and a bit of potato salad. Yummy lunch while we watched the news. (Yes, vegan pulled pork tastes just like regular pulled pork. Amazing.) I did some more email and then worked on workshops.

4:30 p.m. Headed down to our office in a condo on the main floor of this building and worked for at least an hour on moving heavy boxes of books and trying to sort things. Wow, Kris and I have published a lot of stuff over the decades. I managed to move and unload to shelves and repack for storage about ten boxes in an hour before I got tired and went upstairs to take a nap with the cats.