How to prepare for a first draft

A hundred thousand words is too large to contemplate. A few hundred words a day is not. The novel is finished by the habit, not by heroism.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. It is generally beyond the capacity of the human mind to contemplate vast distances, so we break them into pieces small enough to start. A typical novel of, say, 100,000 words is too great a quantity to hold in the head at once. Divide it into a daily target and the job stops requiring superhuman powers.

Writing 500 words a day, five days a week, is 2,500 words a week. A hundred thousand words is forty such weeks — a little over nine months. Call it ten if you would like room for the weeks when life intervenes. That is a significant book attained with an apparently insignificant effort. You do not prepare for a car journey of 10,000 miles as a single heroic drive. Most drivers travel that far in a year by clocking up a few miles whenever they go out. The mental preparation for a novel is the same: establish the habit, and forget the Herculean aspect.

One chapter at a time

My own routine is organised by chapters. I immerse myself in one chapter and, because the chapters are fairly short, I get to mark a completion with satisfying regularity. The celebration is not champagne. It is the plain fact of a unit that now exists, which makes the next unit conceivable.

Stay with the sentence or the paragraph in front of you. Eventually you sit back and notice that you have done a thing many outsiders treat as nearly impossible. They are looking at the whole distance. You were looking at the next paragraph. Both of you are describing the same book.

Preparation, then, is not a month of buying notebooks. It is deciding the hour, the number, and the rule that you stop when the number is done even if the prose is plain. The first draft’s job is to exist. Elegance is a later draft’s job.