3 Things I Learned from Writing My Twentieth Novel

1. The writing doesn’t get easier.

This is the big, sad reality of novel writing. At least it is in my case. You’d think after nineteen books I’d be able to finally write a first draft that came easily, that just flowed right off my fingertips from day one. Yes, there were scenes in my latest novel that were lots of fun, and I was happy to slowly but surely figure out the arc of my story and the depth to my characters.

But the writing itself wasn’t easier. In fact, in a sense, the writing has become harder in the last couple years because I actually feel more pressure now than I did with the early books. When I was writing up a storm in 2010 and 2011, I felt free to make mistakes, I didn’t overthink anything, I genuinely enjoyed almost every second of the process.

Now, however, the pressure is on. I’ve completed an MFA in Creative Writing. I have a whip-smart literary agent who tells me when my writing stinks. And I’ve been at this for nearly ten years now. In some way I don’t feel I have the option to screw up another one. I don’t have the option to make any more mistakes.

I haven’t been traditionally published yet, and after writing twenty novels, there’s a tendency to ask myself why. Am I not good enough? Will I never be good enough? Will I never get a book published even I end up writing another twenty of them?

I wanted the first draft of my latest to go seamlessly, to feel really, really good every day. And while I feel great about the manuscript now and am excited to tackle the second and third drafts in the months to come, many of the writing days were really, really, really hard. Like, where I would stress over a single sentence for twenty minutes. Where I’d write a whole page… then erase it and start over. Where I’d question a character’s motivation in chapter six while I was currently working on chapter ten.

All sorts of things went wrong, and worse, I often found myself tearing my hair out in a few tough places in the story. I wanted to scream (and sometimes did). I wanted to cry (and definitely almost did). Partly because the writing process was hard, like it’s always hard — in the words of Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, “the hard is what makes it great” — but also because I’ve just written so many books, and I feel like by now the writing part shouldn’t still be kicking my ass so much.

Thankfully, at the end of the day, I got 90% or so of my original vision of this novel on the page, and I’m ecstatic about that. Now that it’s done, now that the hardest part is over, I can celebrate. You should always celebrate when you finish a first draft of a novel because, like I often say, a messy first draft is a lot more useful than an incomplete first draft. There are places in my new book I’ll need to revise, cut, re-shape heavily, and that’s okay. But a draft is done. Now I have something to work with.

2. The one thing that does get easier is hitting the words I want to hit every day.

Although writing novels doesn’t necessarily get easier year after year, the one thing I do feel gets easier is making your word counts every day while you’re writing. I really struggled with this in the beginning. Back in 2010, when I wrote my first novel Slate, I aimed for 2,000 words a day for eight straight weeks, and so often I failed to reach that number. I would get to 1,600 words and say, okay, that’s enough. There were a few days I stopped at 1,000. Rarely did I actually pass 2,000. I remember having the same struggle on my second novel, Happy Birthday to Me.

But that’s never an issue these days. I sit down at my writing desk in the morning, and I decide how many words I want to hit, and I always reach that number for the day, even if I only have two hours of writing time. Even if my time is limited, I still reach the word count I set for myself.

On my twentieth novel, I started by aiming for 2,200 words a day. I of course allowed myself to go over that number, but I couldn’t go a word under. And I never did. The absolute lowest amount of words I wrote in a day during that 31-day period was 2,200 words. The most? 4,200 words. That was my marathon final day of writing this past Wednesday. I can’t even remember the last time I wrote 4,200 words in a single non-stop novel writing session. That was a little bit insane, and took almost five hours, but I was finishing the novel, so I was able to do it.

Throughout the years you pick up on little tricks to reach your word counts. Like listening to the right music. Like picking the time of day when you’re at your most creative (for me it’s between 10am and 2pm).

Something I do lately that helps a lot is not think of it as reaching 2,200 words in 2 hours or whatever. I look at trying to hit 500 words in 30 minutes. That’s the goal I aim to achieve from now on.

When I start writing at 10:30am, I do everything in my power to hit 500 words by 11am. If it takes until 11:05am or 11:10am, fine, but it’s a really awful writing day if, say, an hour passes, and I still haven’t hit 500 words. That’s when I know it’s gonna be a very long day.

And yes it happened to me once on my latest novel. Just this past Tuesday, actually. The day before I finished writing the novel. I could not figure out how to start chapter nineteen. I tried three different ways, and they all sucked. And I erased them all.

I was nearly ninety minutes into my session where I finally figured out a good way to start the chapter, and then I found a rhythm. But those ninety minutes of false starts hurt like you wouldn’t believe. Especially since I was so close to being done, and frankly exhausted from writing for a month straight. Thankfully I figured out what to do, and I ended up writing more than 3,000 words in the next two hours. I hit my word count goal and more.

In the last five years, I’ve been able to hit my daily word count 100% of the time, and that basically comes from lots and lots of practice.