How to Write a Novel Without Trying

A brief outlining of my planned and future works left me with one very present notion:  I will be writing forever.

At my current age (just south of 30), I already have enough planned works to keep me writing until I'm 51, which does not account for marriage, children, and the various other life moments that tend to take precedence over penmanship, nor does it account for more than 20 years of continued experience and the neverending imagination which has led to so many topical options in the first place.  That is to say, my creativity has entered something of a cycle of perpetual motion.

The List, such as it is (tentative titles, all):

• The Order
• Dawnwatcher (fantasy epic)
• Gunner 7: Final edition
• The Rules (romantic comedy)
• Shinigami Blues II
• The Empty West:  Book III
• Darcy's (three intertwined stories)
• Letters to Marianna (dark Elizabethan romance)
• The Furies (modern sci-fi adventure)
• Persephone's Return: Book I (future sci-fi adventure)
• Persephone's Return: Book II
• Persephone's Return: Book III

That said, I both aim to have children and to have enough of these ideas out of my head by the time I'm 40 to make room for 10 years' worth of inspirations, which leaves me very much in need of a new strategy.  Cranking out a new novel every two years with more than half the process being staring at a blank screen for half an hour before deciding to do something else is simply not a sustainable model in the long-term.

So, the plan is thus:  every week of every month of every year, I will write at minimum 1,000 words.  In addition, I will be aiming to meet the NaNoWriMo challenge each year. I will, however, except a total of 30,000 words instead of the typical 50,000 pending the following condition:  June is now mini-November, meaning that I will be partaking of two Writing Months each year.

Running the math, I'm left with 44,000 words from the weekly devotion plus (at minimum) 60,000 words from the paired NaNo's, producing over 100,000 words per yer, which allows me to meet just about any publisher's minimums.  Any novel falling shy of 100,000 words will be edited using the remaining word count time.  I anticipate at least a few of these to run over, but the overall model is maintained:  instead of a novel ever two and a half years, I can put out most novels in a year, fully functional, and the larger projects in two years or less.

For any potential writers out there who can't seem to get an idea off the ground, I highly recommend this model.  1,000 words to the average person is about 2-3 hours of writing.  That's less than1.5% of your week.  You likely spend as much time reading Digg, Facebook, or various random blog postings :)  Hold yourself to 1,000 words a week and you'll have 50,000 words at the end of every year.  It's not as grueling as the NaNoWriMo challenge.  Not only will you not risk losing friends, it's likely they won't even notice you're writing until the work is complete.

If what you're having trouble with is forming your idea, stay tuned:  next week I plan on discussing the nature of the novel idea through the eyes of a number of other more familiar media.  It turns out even writers have a Circle of Fifths, and I'm not referring to the drinks around the table :)