How to write a book fast
Improve your writing process with these tips
Everyone has their own writing process and novel writing strategies that work best for them. I’m not here to tell anyone how to write a book. Okay, maybe I am, but it’s entirely up to you if you want to take my advice and finish writing a novel faster. As a book coach, I help clients with a fiction writing process I designed to be as fast and easy as possible (though let me emphasize that there are no shortcuts, just more and less efficient ways of writing). There are many good reasons to write more efficiently, but the main reason I’ve discovered is that writers get burnt out on their own stories. Your creative brain might reach a point where you can barely tolerate your own story, words and characters. Writing a novel efficiently minimizes these feelings of story-burnout and gets you to the finish line faster. Here are my best tips for writing a novel fast:
1) Get structure in first
I can’t emphasize this enough, but one of the biggest mistakes new writers make is writing several drafts of an entire book without having a solid understanding of story structure. What is story structure? Story structure is a framework that all novels, films, tv shows, plays and other types of stories follow. There are variations in structure (3 Act, 5 Act and others), but what’s important to understand is that the human brain absorbs and pays attention to stories that follow a structure. Human brains get bored and stop paying attention to stories that don’t follow structure. Ever DNF a book? It’s probably because the structure was lacking. Some features of typical structure include the inciting incident, rising action, midpoint, all-is-lost moment and climax. It’s okay to use variations, but you need to first understand structure clearly. The structure is incredibly difficult to get into a story in the later stages of writing. You should always solidify your structure either in an outline (highly recommend) or first draft (doable but you’ll have more deleting and rewrites).
2) Connect character to theme and plot early
Something else you should decide on early is what kind of transformation your character will go through. Following that line of thinking, you’ll need to decide what theme or message you want to communicate through your character’s journey. Check out my post Why you need a theme for your novel for more information on theme. Stories that lack theme and strong character arcs also fail to hold a reader’s attention. The reason you need to decide on your character’s transformation early is so that you can design a plot that forces them to learn the lesson of the story. Your character’s journey should always tie directly to your plot. You’re not putting your character through things for nothing, you’re putting them through things so that they come out a changed and better person (or, if it’s a tragedy, they may remain the same despite signs of change). Your plot will be decided by your character’s transformation journey, so in order to know the plot points and direction of the story, you need to decide what your character must learn and how they might learn it first.
3) Save aesthetic edits until later drafts
Speaking of mistakes aspiring authors make, I always see new writers trying to massage, edit, fuss with or perfect the writing in their early drafts. Beautiful turns of phrase, breath-taking descriptions and snappy dialogue should always be massaged and perfected in later drafts. Why? Because you will find yourself spending a lot of time on making perfect scenes only to realize you need to delete or remove them. Plus, once you’ve spent time making the writing beautiful in a scene, it will be much harder to convince yourself to delete it. A good rule of thumb is always: story first, writing second. In your outline and first draft, you should be mainly focused on getting your structure and story down. In your second and third draft, you will be working on refining the writing and micro-craft elements. My opinion is that most writers can complete a story in about three drafts (with an outline). If you find yourself writing many more drafts than that, chances are you haven’t clearly solidified your structure, theme and character arc.
Let me be clear. The novel writing process is not fast at all. It takes time and an awful lot of patience with yourself and the industry. But, I truly believe if you follow these tips you’ll be able to write a novel more efficiently. Efficiency in this case means you’ll have fewer drafts, fewer revisions and less burnout. If you need help writing a novel, I’ve designed a step-by-step process for my book-coaching clients that helps them plan a cohesive novel, draft at a pace that works with their schedule and minimize the time they spend on revisions. Want to know how to maximize your writing time, refine your writing process or improve your story skills? Get in touch with any questions or to set up a free 30-minute chat.
