I got an e-mail today from an aspiring writer. She wanted to know how much she should write each day if she wanted to call herself a novelist. My first instinct was to tell her to do the math. You want to finish your novel in X number of days, and you want it to be Y number of words long. So do the math. Then I realized this wasn't really a helpful answer. Anyone can do the math.
She wanted a goal for writing a novel, and I have a really hard time setting goals for other people. I'm not the one writing her book. But an answer like that is maddeningly unhelpful. So I thought about it a while. I thought about it as I composed an article I'd been meaning to get to. I thought about it as I worked on a rough draft for my third novel. And I thought about it as I edited the manuscript for my second non-fiction book. Then, realizing I'd been awake for 27 hours, I took a nap.
When I woke, the e-mail was still sitting there. The e-mail gremlins hadn't answered this girl in my absence. It was time to come up with a real answer. I realized that I had one that came straight out of my own experience. When I started writing my first novel, Arianna's Tale, I wrote maybe 500 words a day. 500 usable words. Sometimes that meant I'd write 2000 but only keep 500. So that seems like a good answer to me.
Sort of. Finally, I decided that the answer was this: Start by writing 500 usable words a day. Every day. Holidays, weekends, days you feel so sick you can't sit up. Type them, scribble them on notepaper, whatever. But get 500 words done every day. If you think you can't write tomorrow, write 750 today and 750 the day after tomorrow to stay on track. Deal with writer's block in any way that allows you to meet these goals. But meet them. No excuses. If I made excuses, my first novel never would have been completed.
Over time, and well before I'd finished the first novel, those 500 words became too easy. I'd have them done shortly after breakfast. Then I'd waste the rest of the day doing whatever came into my head. So I upped my goal. I decided that I could write 1000 each day (not including all the discarded junk, of course). I was getting better at putting my idea, my story, onto paper (actually, into the computer). By the time I approached the end of Dragon's Tempest, I was writing 2500 usable words a day. Now, halfway through Thief's Heartache, I'm writing an average of 4000 words a day. Some days I allocate some of this word count to another project, but I always meet this goal.
So my answer to the question would be this: start with 500 words every day. When that become too easy, adjust it so that you're still writing, still working towards that finished product. If you don't miss a day, you'll soon find yourself with a completed novel on your hands.
If you're going to be a professional writer, you have to learn how to manage your time. Not doing so is the fifth and possibly the most damaging mistake a writer can make. Of the top five mistakes a professional writer can make, this is the one I'm guilty of on a faily regular basis. This mistake is sneaky and can take many forms.
The most obvious way this problem manifests itself is in distractions. If you're spending 4 hours on Facebook or Twitter, or simply sufring the web for no particular reason, then you're gulity of allowing yourself to get distracted. You can't write while you're ready every status update posted on Facebook in the last 4 hours. It's just not going to happen. You have to learn to close your web browser and get back to writing. Better yet, don't open the web browser in the first place.
There are other ways that time management becomes a problem, at least for me. I'm an incredibly impulsive person and I get e-mails from clients all day long. I check my e-mail (which I should probably only do once a day anyway) and accept virtually all requests from my clients. Need a 2000-word article by noon? No problem. Generally. But when I accept 6 requests for articles to be completed by the end of the day, and lengthy articles at that, I might just have a problem managing my time well enough to get them all done.
Fortunately, solving time management problems isn't that difficult. You simply need to be able to see the projects you've accepted, their deadlines, and have them broken down into smaller tasks. You can do this easily enough with a large whiteboard or even an oversized calendar. Put it up where you'll see it constantly. When you start getting distracted or you're tempted to take on too much, just look up at your calendar and remind yourself that you have a job to do. Now. Not tomorrow.
I don't like whiteboards and my calendar is pretty and too small to help. But I do love post-its. I write tasks on post-its and plaster them like a calendar all over my window, right in front of my computer. This way, I can look up when I'm wasting time on Facebook and realize that I really do have to get a chapter done. Now! Then I can close my browser and get something done.
Admittedly, managing your time takes a degree of will power. But, if you're going to be a professional writer, well, you have to learn to discipline yourself and get something done. Get a lot of somethings done. It's the only way you'll make any money as a writer. Writing is a great career, but you have to work at it.
This time I'm going to share with you a mistake that I made. Repeatedly. At least five or six times when I first started writing professionally. Five or six times in a row, I might add. And the mistake? Quoting a price for a project that is far too low for the work involved.
This mistake can kill a writer just as surely as any of the others. If you accept a project thinking that it will take you only 8 hours and it winds up taking you 24, well, you're not making much money (or at least not as much as you should). There's really only one way to avoid this mistake. You have to read everything about a project, and read it carefully.
Before you read anything, determine what your hourly rate is. I charge a minimum of $60/hour of work in most cases. I'll work for cheaper in the cases of charities or other worthy causes, but I won't work for free (see the second mistake). That $60/hour (or more, depending on the project) includes research, a draft version that is approved by the client, revisions, editing, and the production of a final polished version. When I just started out, I charged less. As I gained experience, my price went up (just as the time it takes me to complete a given project went down, so clients ended up paying the same anyway).
Once you know what you charge per hour, figure out how many hours the project in question will take you. This requries a little experience and you'll probably get it wrong a few times, so get to know yourself and your ability to complete a project. I can complete a 1000-word article, start to finish, in about 1 hour, if the subject matter is at least a litle familiar to me. Subjects I'm not versed in may take 2 hours. If I'm ghostwriting an entire book ... well, that takes more than just a few hours. My price always reflects how much time has to go into a project.
When your quoting a price to a client, know exactly what you're promising. Work out exactly how much work you'll be doing and have it specified in a contract signed by both you and the client. You'll probably make a mistake once in a while and have to just eat the cost yourself. But a contract helps you to see how much work you're committing to. It also serves as a barrier for when a client tries to pile on more work without providing you with additional compensation. This will happen, so learn to stick to your contracts.
I was wandering around the Internet the other day (since I have nothing else do while my brain organizes my next plot) and I came upon what must be the third mistake of professional writing. I saw at least three sites out there asking for entire chapters of an e-book as a sort of "test" for writers, promising that if these writers meet their standards, the writers will each get a contract to write an e-book. Paid and everything.
This sounded odd to me, as a professional writer. So, I decided to enlist the aid of a couple of online writing pals to investigate one of them. We each signed up and received a description of the potential e-book and were told which chapter would be our "sample" chapter. Interesting fact: all three of us were assigned different chapters in the same e-book. If this book had 14 chapters (which it appeared to), and the site managed to get 14 people to write "sample" chapters, then they get an entire e-book without ever having to "hire" any of the writers. Sneaky, sneaky.
The lesson here: a "sample" should not be an entire chapter or article. A "sample" would usually consist of a very short work, just enough to show your abilities as a writer (and a researcher, as most writing requires some research). Don't put your faith in false promises and hand over more of your work than necessary. Best case: use something already published as a writing "sample." At least you've already been paid for it.
