Hello, everyone. This is day six of the 28-day writing challenge. I’m excited because today I wrote the first chapter of the book that I am currently working on! Well, my “first” chapter is actually chapter eight.
If you do the blueprinting that we talked about before and you have it done for your whole book, you can really start on any chapter that you want to. In my case, I’m starting on chapter eight because I have the material for chapters one through seven from blog posts and a previous book that I had written. I’m taking some of the chapters out of that. I can do that because I own the copyright.
So I got chapter eight done today, and also the blueprint for chapter nine. Now my goal was to get chapter 8 or chapters eight and nine written today and the blueprints for chapters nine and 10. So you can see I’m still about a day behind my personal goals, but I think that I will be able to catch up.
There is Time to Catch Up!
Since we are not including Saturdays and Sundays in the 28 days, I could catch up on the weekends when needed. But, even though I seem to be a day behind, I’m still excited about what I did accomplish.
The Timer Method
I was able to write this chapter today, in 45 minutes. You may ask, “How did you do that?” Well, I used my magic timer. I have two timers. One of them is bigger with red. That’s the one you see most of the time. I have a smaller one and I set it for five minutes, I look at my blueprint, and I answered the question, and I keep writing for five minutes. When the time’s up, I put an ellipsis (…) and I go to the next one.
If I get through more quickly, I just force myself to write and throw in more material. Sometimes it is surprising what does come to mind whenever that happens. Doing it that way is how I have the chapter done so quickly.
Now I have chapter nine blueprinted. I ended up with nine questions for chapter nine, so I’m very confident that I’ll be able to write chapter nine in 45 minutes also.
Using the timer is very motivating when you are trying to get your rough draft done. Now, this obviously is not the finished product. Later in the challenge, probably around day 10, I will show you how I will be working with that.
The Word-Count Method
Some of you are not wired that way, and you’ll have to do it a different way, You would have to figure out the number of words per day that you want to write. So the timer is the constant way I’m doing it and the number of words would be your constant way of doing it. If you use the word count method, your daily writing time may vary.
So I’m one day behind but I’m still ahead enough to be able to write the next chapter when it comes to blueprinting. So I’m excited about that.
Comparing the Two
I talked about the use of a timer and timed writing to get your chapter done as opposed to the number of words. Well, that is sort of like TV production. You can have taped TV production and you have live TV production. The advantage of the taped TV production is that you can edit and edit and edit and it can take forever. When you do live, it is what it is and when the program is over you are through and you get to go home.
Now in some of those cases, there’s a lot of post-production work that goes on to improve the quality of the program. Whatever the time is, the time the program is over with and that’s why I liked the time of writing a rough draft.
Well, I hope this has been encouraging to you. I hope you’ve planned out your next step and maybe started figuring it out. Keep watching me as I go through my joys and maybe some struggles of getting this one done. Remember YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!