#3: Creating a Writing Schedule

There’s no right or wrong way to write a story. Some authors only work on the weekends, some work any free second they get. The majority sets the same time or go by a daily word count goal to reach. Me, I’m a daily scribbler. I get out of sorts if I don’t write, so I don’t like to skip a day in my daily writing.

But you have never considered writing everyday or you have never set up your own deadline, so what do you do? First decide how much time for writing you can schedule in. You may need to drop some mindless TV watching or restrict the time spent online. You should plan to do a little everyday rather than plan on spending all weekend cramming in twelve hours writing. Your imagination needs time to recharge. Remember you can always write more, so plan for an amount you can reach daily comfortably.

Stephen King recommends “a 1000 words a day, and because I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll also suggest you can take one day a week off, at least to begin with. No more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of your story if you do.” (On Writing 156) This is a good goal, but don’t be afraid to drop it down if you need to. Some beginners start with 500 or 250 words a day. The important part is to reach the same amount consistently, so it becomes a writing habit.

You’ve spent all your writing time before now turning papers in for grades, deadline have always been set for you. Setting a deadline for publishing your story will help you finish the story. Twelve to eighteen months is standard for working on a novel; shorter works need less time. Todd A. Stone’s method has you divide the time available into thirds: “one-third to mental preparation, planning, invention, and development; one-third to producing a quality draft; and one-third to revision, editing, and proofreading.” (Novelist’s Boot Camp 14) Mark these intervals on your working calendar and start working on your daily goals.

Keeping Track

This is really a great time to be a writer. Instead of measuring daily progress by sheets of paper typed, word processing programs can count your words. And other people have programmed helpful graphic counters and spreadsheets trackers to show off your daily progress.

The counter I use on my blog is the Picometer from Writertopia. It is the most versitle I have found, and very simple to change the target amounts along with what has been done daily without messing with too much coding. So I can use it with all my writing projects.

Progress Bar from Writertopia

Progress Bar from Writertopia

I wish I could tell you who created the marathon-tracker.xls file I use in Excel, but I think the site I got it from went defunct. I adore it because it isn’t fixed to only use it for 50,000 words in thirty days that National Novel Writing Month has made famous. You can change the length of the challenge in days and word count. Also it has been programmed with commentary on your progress, as well as calculating your words per hour, how many words you have left, and when you will reach your total based on how you have been performing.

Download the marathon-tracker.xls

These tools help you watch the small daily amounts add up to the completed story, so you can see your progress in a glance. As you build up a daily writing habit, seeing that progress makes it easier to keep writing every day.