My New Novel Writing Process

The last time I wrote a novel (that I completed) was back in 2018. I finished the second novel of what was intended to be a six-book series. I then started the third novel, feeling the adrenaline coming off the second novel, but I overestimated my ability to push through, and instead, I crashed and burned out.

I’d like to think I learned a lot about myself in the time I spent away from writing novels and instead put my time and focus on short story writing. I’m now ready to get back to writing novels but I’m going about it completely different than I did in the past. Below, I intend to outline two different ways in which I will approach the actual writing of chapters. Each will have its own pros and cons for why they are a good methodology to use. I’m still on the fence on which one I will decide to use but I have to think fast because I’m going to start writing on Monday, May 17th and that is just around the corner!

If you could read each method and help me decide which you think would be best by voting in the poll at the bottom of this post, I’d appreciate it!

There is one thing that both methods have in common and that is my streaming schedule. I intend to do all of my novel writing while on stream and therefore what I do on which days is really the question here when deciding between each method:

METHOD ONE

I’m thinking I’ll write as many chapters as I can on the following stream days: Monday - Wednesday & Friday. Then, on Saturday, I’ll take all of the chapters I’ve written and put them through my EDIT #1 paces of just editing the grammar, punctuation and spelling issues in those chapters I wrote.

Keeping in mind that I stream about 3hrs each day, that would be 12hrs of streaming time. I’m hoping to write about 15k - 20k words a week which is about 5 - 7 chapters a week.

My average word count an hour is 2k words so I’m being easy on myself and decreasing how much I think I’ll be able to write each week cause I’d be devastated if I didn’t meet my high expectations. I find it’s better to aim just under what you believe you can achieve so you come out on top and feel good with every completed task.

Okay, so it’s not exactly editing as I go because I’ll be writing for 4 days, then editing…

If you’re wondering why I have this as a viable option, it’s because I think my self-EDIT #2 will be a bit time consuming and depending on how long it takes me to actually finish the whole book, I want to make sure I give myself plenty of time to do that second edit.

METHOD TWO

This method is fairly simple. I’ll just write on all 5 days that I stream, that’s 15hrs each week. I think my chapter average would pretty much be the same of 5 - 7 chapters, so that wouldn’t increase at all by including this stream day as a writing day.

The benefit to this is if I’m on a roll with my writing, I would maintain that pace and it’s likely that I’ll end up writing more chapters faster because I won’t be interrupting myself with one editing day a week.

Of course, I won’t know any of this till I start writing, and there is my dilemma.

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I’m sure many of you are thinking I could just wing it and on days where I’m just not feeling like writing I could edit and on days when I’m on a roll, skip editing. The thing is, I want to build a routine and a habit that isn’t based on winging it from the beginning.

So far, I love the routine I have now where I spend the first six weeks doing research and worldbuilding. That was definitely time well spent and I don’t regret a day that I did that. Now I have the next six weeks in my goal of writing a vomit draft in three months (90 days) and I want to keep going with a routine.

Which method would you use?

ONE

TWO

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