Hello!
Happy Birthday Harry Potter! July 31st!
What? You mean it’s not a national holiday?
In any case, today is the perfect day to look forward to August and plot out (ha!) what my writing schedule is going to look like for the next month.
My goal, like any other writer’s goal, is to finish my book. It seems like an impossible goal. And without planning, it would be. Today, I’m going to go through my planning process and how it can work for you.
Step 1: Establish Your Finish Line
Yes, yes, we are trying to finish the book. But where, and how, and when? What is the last scene in that book, where are your characters at, physically and mentally? What needs to happen to wrap this sucker up? Get a Post-it note and write it down, stick it somewhere you will see every single day. That is your new goal.
Step 2: Work Backwards
Now that you’ve found your finish line, think about all of the hurdles your story needs to go through to get to that point. Let’s think about Harry Potter (And the Sorcerer’s Stone) for a minute. The end goal in this story is to fight & defeat Voldemort, but Harry begins as a nobody stuck in a cupboard under the stairs. How on earth did he get from point A to point Z? For Harry, he had to learn that he was a wizard, make friends with Ron & Hermione, make enemies with Malfoy, learn the importance of Voldemort, find the trap door, get past the three-headed dog, the wizard’s chess etc. These are all plot points that introduce conflict in the story. Conflict is what develops your characters an gets them precisely from point A to point Z.
For your story, find your three-headed dogs, trolls, and golden snitches and jot them down. Make a list or excel doc (I use multi-colored post-it notes).
Step 3: Think About How Well You Know Yourself
I mean seriously, we don’t need to be singing kumbaya with our inner writer or anything
(or maybe we do) but take a good look at your writing habits realistically.
Take one of your post-it notes, and think about that scene. Think about what needs to be accomplished, the level of difficulty that scene will be, and most importantly, establish how much time it will take you to write that scene. & Plan accordingly. For me, I have five scenes that will take about one day each to write, three scenes that will take me about two days each, and one scene that will take me three.
You better believe that three-day scene is intimidating to me, which is why I am going to tackle it first. If I push it off, it will (continue) to never get done. Know yourself.
Step 4: Have Reasonable Expectations
So you should have a couple of post-it notes with your scenes written down, and the amount of time you plan to take for each of those scenes. Think about the month and how it’s going to play out for you on a personal and professional level. For me, Sundays are almost always a wash I’m either going to a movie, kayaking, swimming, hanging out with friends and family, or running errands and I almost never write. The Fall semester is going to rear its ugly head in the last week of the month, but my summer classes don’t end until the first Friday in August either. So, when I am placing my carefully crafted sticky notes, I am avoiding Sundays and the first & last week of the month. Give yourself permission to not write on days that really just aren’t going to work for you. Everything else is fair game.
Step 5: Don’t Miss the First Day of Practice
Have you ever joined a sports team, or a club and missed the first day? What about the first day of school? You know that sinking feeling you get? Like you’ve failed before you’ve even begun?
The idea here is: all you have to do is show up on day one. Then, once you make it, your goal shifts into showing up for day two and so on. The goal is not: Break my mind and body so I can finish this book on a deadline. The goal is: show up every day and write- something. Anything at all. If you worry about this deadline you’ve set for yourself all month- nothing is getting done. However, if you show up every day, and by showing up I mean get out of bed and open your laptop or journal (that’s it!), and you write and you still don’t finish the book- no biggie.
Excuse me? No biggie?
Yeah, no biggie. Because if you showed up and wrote every day and you still didn’t finish your book, that means you underestimated the potential of your story. You might’ve been a little off in Step 3 and overextended yourself- so the book’s not finished. But now you have one month’s worth of writing under your belt and you are that much closer. Keep going.
Step 6: Don’t Stop
Actually, that’s all.
Thanks for reading!
Plume Fiction 