• Stuck in a full-time job but want to write a novel instead?
  • Wondering how you’ll ever find time for your personal projects when you have so much on your plate?
  • Thinking about trying to tackle National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo) this November, but worried you can’t write that many words or your novel will end up being terrible?

 

 

If you need more time and more energy, ask yourself this question: What would doubling your writing speed do for you?

In other words, what if you could produce the same quality words in half the time? Imagine:

  • You could write your novel twice as fast
  • You could write a blog post twice as fast
  • You could finish National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo) with half the number of hours and much less stress…

Now, what if you could actually write 3 or 4 times as fast, consistently, without it draining your energy or feeling difficult? (This is what I accomplished!)

And what if you could learn how to do it in a single weekend?

How To At Least Double Your Writing Speed in a Weekend

Back when I was in my early 20’s, I desperately wanted to be a full-time fiction author, but couldn’t figure out how to make it happen.

From 2009-2013, I wrote five not-very-good novels in my spare time while working 60+ hours a week, first as the marketing director at a series of startups, then as a freelance marketing, copywriting, and strategy consultant.

It was a lot to handle all at once, and frankly I was failing at all of it!

I found myself working harder and harder for not many results. It took me an entire year to write a book and I barely had the energy to sit down and write after dealing with my job, my bills, my dwindling bank account, and my personal life. On the business front, I was stuck in a cycle of feast or famine with finding clients, which left me in a high stress and desperation mode a lot of the time.

By the end of 2013, I had been trying to become a full-time author for five years and hadn’t gotten much closer than when I started. In the meantime, I’d spent around $30,000 trying to figure it out, and making tons of costly mistakes.

I couldn’t dig myself out of my situation. In fact, it felt like I was really just digging a grave where my creative career dreams could go to die!

I knew that if I could get either money or time, I would have just enough leverage to escape my pattern of being broke + never having enough clients + never having time to get my personal creative projects off the ground.

I decided to improve just one thing—my writing speed. I figured, if I could write 2000, 3000, even 4000 words per hour, I could get my freelancing work done faster and still have a little time left over for my personal projects. Then, I could actually get my projects out for once and they would start making passive income. And THEN, I could scale back on freelance clients, which would create more time, and …

Well, you know the rest 🙂

I was eventually able to quadruple my writing speed, and it didn’t take me very long to figure it out—just a few weeks, actually!

Novel Writing Prep + The 8-Minute Writing Habit

Once I did this, the floodgates opened up. I was able to raise my freelance rates while at the same time lowering my time spent on freelancing.

I was also able to complete my personal projects much faster and went on to write about a book every 1-2 months, starting in 2014!

The thing that changed everything for me was in September of 2013 when I forced myself to write 50,000 words a month. I really just wanted to prove to myself that I could take my own dreams seriously. If I didn’t make it happen, I was going to quit!

When I crossed that mark on September 30th, I felt shocked. 50,000 words—it was possible. Not only was it possible… It was possible for me!

I also thought, “What a fluke!”

So I decided to try again October of 2013.

I hit 50,000 words that month, too!

It was not a fluke… It was a systematic process that anyone could follow…

The First Step To Writing 50,000 Words of a Great Novel in Only One Month

Maybe you are:

  • Building an author career but can’t get books out quickly
  • Building a creative career but are having trouble getting it off the ground
  • Trying to get through #NaNoWriMo but nervous about the word counts or not sure you have the hours in the day…

I hear you, and I can tell you that writing faster is one of the skills that took me very little time to learn, but has paid off dividends and changed my life completely in just a few years.

There were many things I did to write faster, but the very first one, which only took me a weekend to figure out, was this:

Step #1: You have to know what you are going to write before you write it.

I learned that if I prepped my novel ideas by taking it through a sound and simple storytelling framework, I could write 50,000 words of a novel in less than a month. Sometimes in less than a few weeks!

More importantly, I wasn’t just writing some junk novel that would die on my hard drive. I was writing a good novel—one that was workable, editable, and worthy of readers, agents, and publishers.

This simple set of prompts to plan your novel (30 of them total) was my best-kept secret to writing high-quality first drafts of novels quickly.

In fact, I’ve used this 30-day novel planner to publish 16 novels and novellas under two pen names. I even hit the USA Today bestseller list with one of them!

Prepare Your Novel Today

If you’re interested in grabbing this 30-day novel planner so you can prepare to write 50,000 words of your novel (or next novel) in a single month, I highly encourage you to check out Novel Writing Prep: A 30-Day Planner That Prepares You To Write 50,000 Words in One Month. It’s the first book in The Productive Novelist series, and I think you’ll love how simple these prompts are.

Planning out my novel using these simple prompts literally doubled my writing speed overnight. It was awesome!

In the book, I also provide you with some modern storytelling examples from books you’ll have heard of (Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Martian, The Fault in Our Stars) and some key mindset tips for getting through a 50,000 word month—whether you’re doing #NaNoWriMo or working on your own!

Read the book description: Amazon

Learn the Full Process For Writing Faster and Getting to Those 50,000 Words

Like I said, I quadrupled my writing speed, going from about 700-900 words per hour to 3500+ words per hour. I share my full 4-step process (you already know the first step: know what you are going to write before you write it) in the second book in The Productive Novelist series called The 8-Minute Writing Habit for Novelists: Triple Your Writing Speed and Learn Dictation to Produce More Words, Faster. Check out the description to see if my system might work for you!

Check Out My New Book, Novel Writing Prep!

50,000+ words in 30 days—impossible, right?

Or if it is possible, those words must be total crap—right?

And even if there is some semblance of writing talent in the draft, writing that fast means the plot and characters must make no sense… right?

No. Nope. Wrong!

Yes, you can write 50,000 good words on your novel in as little as a month, as long as you prepare yourself.

Ready to learn how?

Grab my new book, Novel Writing Prep:

Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | Google Play | Barnes & Noble

Monica Leonelle is a USA Today bestseller and the founder of The World Needs Your Book.