Getting It Done
By Victoria Fortune
As anyone who has written a novel knows, it is an elusive and daunting undertaking, perhaps more so for me than others. My right-leaning brain gets caught up in the big picture and struggles with the concrete details of getting it done. Hoping to impose some left-brain order on my chaotic process, I signed up for a class called “How to Finish: Project Management Techniques for Writers,” at Grub Street writing center. (For those not familiar with Grub Street, it is an incredible resource for writers in the Boston area.)
The instructor, Kelly J. Ford, is a project manager who put her professional skills to use in completing her debut novel, Cottonmouths (coming out on June 6!). Her techniques for breaking down novel writing into actionable steps were not only practical, but helped me reflect on what some of my impediments may be.
First, she went through the process of turning a vague goal, such as “finish my book” into a more a specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, time-bound (SMART) goal. I had no trouble with this step: Finish the first draft of my novel by the end of June. My goal satisfied all the requirements except “realistic.” That remains to be seen.
The next step was more difficult: Make a list of at least ten tasks necessary to complete the goal and rank them in order of priority and difficultly level (High and Low). Delineating the finite tasks in the complex process of writing a book is a challenge for me. They all seem to blend together inextricably. I did a lot of research up front, but I continue to do more as I go. I needed to go through what I’ve written and review my major scenes. I also needed to rework my outline. And there are chapters I need to revise, but that’s part of the next goal: revising the first draft. Other than these tasks, all I could come up with was write the next chapter and the next chapter, and so on. At least I recognize this is a weakness I need to work on.
Estimating how long it will take to reach my goal was particularly useful. I’ve set numerous end dates for myself based on nothing but wishful thinking and determination, and watched them sail by unmet. I needed something tangible to base my deadline on. I estimated the time necessary for reviewing my scenes and reworking my outline, but how could I account for the time necessary to finish writing? First, I needed to consider how much I had left to write. For adult novels, commercial and literary, the target word count is between 80,000 and 89,999. (Check out this Writer’s Digest post about word counts.) I’ve written about 30,000 words, so I have 50,000-60,000 to go. I write about a page an hour, and average 325 words per page, so it should (theoretically) take me around 185 hours to produce 60,000 words.
Finally, I had to figure out how much time I can spend per day or week on the project. I’d love to be able to write eight hours a day, seven days a week. Then I’d have my book done in a month. But considering my responsibilities and demands on my time, I know that 12 hours per week is what I can realistically dedicate to this project. Rounding up, that translates to 16 weeks. I took the class in early February, so June was four months away, but I had to consider the unavoidable events (such as a family vacation) that would eat into my writing time. I also didn’t do a great job of isolating all the tasks involved (like additional research). Accounting for this, I realized that finishing by June would be a long shot. I adjusted my goal to finish by end of August.
The last step was to list our top three distractions. It was not hard to pinpoint mine: 1) household/family duties, 2) research tangents, and 3) the news. Whenever possible, I save household tasks for the late afternoon/early evening, when my creative energy is at its lowest. And I’ve gotten better about staying focused while researching, or simply noting in the margins to look something up later. But if I even glance at the headlines these days, I can get sucked in for hours.
Kelly recommended an article, “Freedom & Anti-Social: Helping you with GTD,” that describes tools to block online distractions. (GTD stands for Getting Things Done.) Freedom is an app that blocks the internet for a set period of time, but this makes doing research difficult. I’m more inclined to use Anti-Social, which blocks specific websites (in my case, news sites). And just knowing I need to write for at least 12 hours per week to meet my goal makes me more diligent about avoiding distractions and utilizing my writing time wisely.
I have just scratched the surface of all that Kelly covered in this class. I would highly recommend it to anyone struggling to manage a writing project. She left us with one final tip that I needed to hear: accept that the first draft will be crap. Just get it written and then move on to revision. With Kelly’s advice and Neil Gaiman’s admonishment, “Whatever it takes to finish things, finish,” posted above my desk, inducing guilt whenever I let distractions creep in, I feel hopeful now that I will get it done. At least my self-imposed deadline isn’t a shot in the dark.
