Tips for fast drafting

With Nanowrimo approaching soon, here are some tips to draft fast

Oct 26, 2024

Hello and Welcome to the Writer Story!

We are almost at November, and I know many of you will probably be doing Nanowrimo. This year, however, I’m not drafting a new novel, but I am doing developmental edits for the first draft of my spec romance WIP. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, let’s talk about fast drafting, 50k words in 30 days or 1667 words a day. It’s not an easy feat. Definitely not. But achievable for sure.

So, let’s begin.

Planning :

In order for the words to flow from inside your head to the page, digital or otherwise, planning is of utmost importance. And when we are on a deadline, with no time to waste, we need every minute of writing time to count. No staring at the blank page and blinking cursor.

Before beginning to write, planning it out can be a great reference when the story veers away from the goal, which does happen quite often. Breaking it down into chewable chunks is quite helpful for me. It helps to have a bit of foresight as how characters need to behave, their emotions, dialogue, body language etc., as they progress through the story. Of course I can always come back and edit that stuff. But I have seen like most writers I have this perfectionist attitude and if I write something which doesn’t serve the story well, I feel demotivated to continue. So focussing on a forward-thinking writing where I know I am on track, it makes me feel good about what I wrote aligns with the bigger story in mind and keeps the imposter syndrome at bay.

Schedule :

In our ever so busy lives, the one thing that’s always scarce is time.

And writing demands time. Lots of it, actually.
Now one way to budget time is planning. But once we have that plan, we need to schedule time to actually write. Butt in chair and words in page, write.

If the planning was done right, a couple hours could be good to write the 1667 words a day. But having those two hours out of everyday to write can be a challenge, considering we all have other jobs, chores, family and a life in general.

I like to create a weekly schedule instead. Because I know which days I can have more time to give to writing and which days are tightly packed to find even ten spare minutes. So I plan to write 11667 words every week instead. On the weekend, sometimes I have a bit more time and I scrunch in any lag I might have had over the weekdays. It works for me. It gives me enough flexibility while also getting the words down.

Attitude :

Now, writing 11667 words a week isn’t easy. If anyone ever told me writing is easy, I will immediately know that those people aren’t writers at all.

Every writer knows it takes a lot to write, and to write well is a lot of work. Through this process of managing 50k words in 30 days, it’s almost guaranteed to take a toll, physically and mentally. But the attitude really does matter.

If we consider writing to be a chore, something that you must do for the sake of it, like laundry, it’ll be exhausting. The exact reason why laundry always gets a bad rep, and people would rather wear their socks inside out than put it in the washer.

So all I’m saying is keeping a positive attitude throughout the entire process as you draft on your next masterpiece, is going to serve a long way.

Okay folks, that’s all there is for now.

I’d love to know if you have any special tips and tricks to fast draft that you use for your writing.

The Writer Story

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