One of the questions I get asked most often is, I’ve got an idea for a book, how should I start? And, more often than not, the people asking this haven’t put pen to paper or typed out a word because it feels overwhelming. So I want to share my experience of writing my fifth novel, which I did in just 65 days.
Unplanned has (at the time of writing), 4.5 stars on Amazon with over 1,300 reviews and reached the top 10 in British Contemporary Fiction.
My publishing contract deadline was the beginning of February 2022, which was a whole year after handing in All We Left Unsaid. But the emotional impact of writing that book meant I needed a break, and so I took the summer of 2021 off.
I’d already come up with the overview of Unplanned with my editor, so in the autumn it should have simply been a case of getting started. Except, I couldn’t get into it at all. After a lot of crying and soul-searching, I told my editor I was scrapping the book in December 2021.
The options were to start again and hand in the book a whole year late, which meant releasing it in September 2023 instead of 2022. Or, write the damned thing and hand it in on a new deadline extended to the end of February 2022.
I chose option 2 and started writing on 26th December 2021, finishing 9 weeks later with 89,191 words on the deadline of 28th February 2022.
Here’s how I did it:
1. I went with a seed of an idea instead of planning the whole thing out
I already had the idea of a long-term, stable couple who get pregnant despite one party always having said no kids. I played with the question, what if, came up with a very loose arc of a storyline and got started.
Some people need the whole book storyline up front in order to write. Neither way is wrong, and I’ve done both (All We Left Unsaid was planned from start to finish before I wrote it). But simply getting started instead of drowning in planning saved time and besides, the storyline will change as you write it anyways!
2. I didn’t edit as I went along.
Normally, I would start the writing day reviewing the chapter or a whole section I’d written beforehand to ‘get me in the mood’. Which almost always meant getting into the editing trap.
With Unplanned, I simply wrote fresh each day. The storyline evolved, new characters popped up or they’d refer to things that had happened in the story but weren’t written about. Was it a mess? YES. But guess what?
That’s why books are edited multiple times before they ever get published!! I kept a track of the major changes, communicated them to my editor when submitting and then corrected them in the first round of edits. Easy.
3. I used my menstrual cycle
Even if you don’t have a cycle, you can still incorporate the wisdom of cyclical living which is, to weave in rest. The truth is, that in that 65 day timespan, I didn’t write every day! When I had my period, I made sure to take at least one day off to rest my brain, my heart and my body. And I still made the deadline.
That’s because we are not machines. We need time away from our work and creative endeavours because it helps us to generate fresh ideas!
4. I figured out my own rhythm
If you’ve ever read or heard someone say you need to go shut yourself in a room all day long and not come out til you’ve written a whole chapter, I call balls. It is so much more effective to realise YOUR rhythm and go with that.
For me, it meant waking up, walking my dog, having breakfast, cleaning, procrastinating, sometimes seeing coaching clients, having lunch and THEN writing. My golden writing time was from around 2pm to 6pm. Yep. All those words were written within a 4-ish hour window because that’s when my brain was switched on enough to get into it.
I drank cacao at the start of my writing block time daily which helped me so much more than coffee, put on a playlist of music that inspired my writing and put my head down until the words were down on the page.
Remember, you’re bringing a whole world into being. You’re manifesting something from nothing. You can’t do that on someone else’s timeline, it has to work for you.
And you know what’s funny? My editors loved Unplanned from the start and, apart from the big structural edits I mentioned above, this book had the easiest editing process of any of the other books I’ve written.
So the way to write a book in 65 days? Get out of your own damned way, and start!
Natalie K. Martin 