Joshua Rigley

I decided to start a book writing challenge, partly because the article writing challenges seem to do well here, and partly because I actually want to get something done for a change.

The Challenge

The challenge is simple; write a full-length (40,000-60,000 words) book in 30 days. The challenge will begin on January 1st, 2014.

I'll be posting daily updates in this thread sharing my progress as I go along. In addition to posting word counts, I will share what tools I used, productivity methods I tried, and anything else I did related to writing. I will be "split-testing" various tools and methods to see what works best for me, and share my results with you.

How to Participate

If you want to participate, just post in this thread stating your intention to participate, and answer the following questions:

1. What book will you be writing? Why?
2. Why do you want to write this book? What "Big Benefit" will you get from completing this book?
3. Are you willing to commit to post daily updates in this thread sharing your progress? Will you do this for every day of the challenge, even if you have days where you don't get anything done?

That last question is especially important. It's easy to get discouraged when you miss a day or two, and decide to give up. Don't make that mistake. Instead, if you miss a day, tell us why you weren't able to get anything done, and what you plan to do in order to succeed the next day. Let me know if there's anything you need help with to stay on track. I'll be happy to help.

Application Example

Here's my Contest Application:

1) I am writing a fantasy novel for this challenge. The reason I chose a fantasy novel is because some friends of mine mentioned how much they enjoyed a short story (also fantasy) I had written and shared with them. It's not going to be easy to write this kind of book vs a non-fiction book (especially in the fantasy genre), but it makes sense for me.

2) The reason why I want to write this book is because I want to accomplish something. I've watched 2013 slip by me without making any significant effort to accomplish any of my personal goals. I want 2014 to be different. The "Big Benefit" I'll get from this is that I will get to feel the satisfaction of holding a novel I wrote in my hands and say, "I am a novelist". Plus my friends will be pretty happy, since they keep asking me if I'm writing a squeal to the short story I shared with them (I am now).

3) I am committed to posting in this thread every single day of this challenge. I will go far beyond simply saying whether or not I hit my daily goal, and will also share the various writing experiments I try out to maximize my productivity. It is my hope that these experiments will help you out in your own writing endeavors.

I'll be linking to all of my post updates from this post, so it'll be easy for you guys to keep track. If any of you would like me to link to your updates from this post, let me know.

Let's make 2014 the year we become authors. Good luck everyone.

Joshua Rigley

Day 1

Today (or yesterday) I failed to make any significant progress towards my goal. I think the reason for this was because I didn't have any plan in place for how to spend my time today. Or on how I wanted to start writing my novel.

I had some vague idea of doing some world building, then getting the plot/characters developed, but that didn't work out too well.

I did try setting a schedule using Google Calendar to see if that would help me focus better. I wasn't able to follow my schedule at all, but it did help me get started on doing something (a timer would have worked just as well for that though).

For tomorrow I've set a schedule in advance (using Google Calendar) to see if I can follow that better.

That wraps up Day 1 for me. On to Day 2!

Joshua Rigley

Day 2

Today was a bit better than yesterday. I have written a grand total of 130 words, all of which were devoted to the "pre-production" phase of writing my novel.

Yesterday I had no clue what I was going to write. Today, however, I have a clear understanding of what my story is going to be. I have a good overview of my story's 3-act structure and overall plot.

I was able to accomplish this with a piece of software called "Snowflake Pro" by Randy Ingermanson. The software is based on Randy's methodology of outlining novels known as "The Snowflake Method".

I'm enjoying the software so far. It's step-by-step nature is well suited to my way of thinking. It might not be as comprehensive as I'd like it to be (for example, it doesn't include a step for world building), but I'll wait until after I go through the steps before I decide whether that's a drawback.

If you're interested in getting a copy of Snowflake Pro, you should know that you can get a 50% discount if you purchase a copy of Randy's book, "Writing Fiction For Dummies ". Even if you aren't interested in the discount, I'd recommend getting a copy of that book anyway, since it's a very comprehensive resource on fiction writing, and the software references to the book in every step.

Google Calendar didn't work out for me today. I still wasn't able to follow my schedule very well, but it was able to help me with getting started on things like "exercise" and "purchase a copy of Snowflake Pro".

I've come to the conclusion that a to-do list will serve me better than a calender.

Also, there's a couple of inspiring music videos I'd like to share with you. I may or may not have listened to these songs 20 times in a row before I was able to stop, but I found them to be very energizing.



That concludes day 2. Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can complete the rest of the steps of Snowflake Pro (I'm on step 3 right now). The sooner I finish designing this novel, the sooner I can write it.

Thanks for reading!

Joshua Rigley

Day 3

Today was a fairly productive day. I've written nearly 1,000 words (980 words to be exact, not counting all the sentences I deleted when editing), and made good progress on fleshing out my novel's plot and characters.

I'm starting to think I may not like Snowflake Pro as much as I did when I first got it. I don't really like how it handles character creation (I feel like it's too rushed, and glosses over important character details, while at the same time insisting on including details that don't matter very much in my opinion). It's still too early to say whether or not I like Snowflake Pro itself, but I still very much like the idea of a guided, step-by-step process for creating plots, characters, etc.

I'm considering making software of my own, similar to Snowflake Pro, but with a much better flow in terms of its step-by-step processes. Snowflake Pro is actually a pretty simple software program, so it wouldn't take very long to make something like it. That will have to wait until later though.

Tomorrow I will try to finish writing out my characters and get a complete scene list of my novel created. After that I will be able to actually start writing the novel itself. I'm also going to start reading a novel (one of the best ways to become a better writer is to read a lot of books). I'm currently debating between "Eragon (Inheritance, Book 1): Christopher... ", "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Book 1):... ", and "Dealing with Dragons: The Enchanted Forest... ".

That concludes Day 3. On to the next day!

Joshua Rigley

Day 4

Didn't get anything done today, since I kept getting sidetracked by other things. I did discover a cool feature in Snowflake Pro though; it can take your plot synopsis and automatically make a scene list from it. That'll save a fair bit of time.

See you guys again tomorrow.

Joshua Rigley

Day 5

I'm not counting Sundays as part of the challenge, so that's why I didn't update yesterday. Today I wrote 56 words, and I almost didn't even do that. The only reason I was able to write anything (despite it being late and me being really tired), was because I convinced myself to write just one sentence before going to bed. If I could write just one sentence, then today would be a success. I ended up writing three.

I learned that trick from the Tiny Habits program by Dr. BJ Fogg. The premise of Tiny Habits is that you take an established habit (like brushing your teeth), and use it as an anchor to trigger a tiny habit (floss one tooth). Tiny habits make getting started on something easy, which is half the battle. Once you get started, it's easy to keep going (usually).

Dr. Fogg offers a free one week session of Tiny Habit building, where you decide on 3 Tiny Habits you want to establish and he sends daily emails to you to help hold you accountable. I did a session once, and found it very helpful. I highly recommend this program.

That's it for today. See you again tomorrow.

Joshua Rigley

Day 6

Today I wrote one more sentence. Having trouble with writer's block, and I put off writing until the last minute. Not a great combination for productivity. :p

See you again tomorrow.

Mr Bill

Focus on progress - not the 30 days. The win is in the daily progress - no matter how small. Keep the updates coming. Perhaps you can write it in 30 writing days instead of 30 calendar days? It might take you 3 or 4 months to complete "30 days of writing". Just a thought. I'm not motivated by dated goals, I only measure daily satisfaction. Not sure if that'll work for you but it works for me and I don't want you beating yourself for a non productive day. Your readers aren't going to care that you missed a day's writing. Focus on the story.

Joshua Rigley

Thanks for your input, Bill. I'm trying to make it a habit to write something every day, so it's kind of important that I make daily progress of some kind. I know the days when I don't get anything done may not be interesting to some, but that's the nature of the challenge; daily updates no matter what. :p Speaking of which...

Day 7

No progress made today whatsoever. I had a successfully unproductive day today. LOL.

Joshua Rigley

Day 8

I wrote 156 words today. I actually started writing the novel using a tool called Ommwriter, which I enjoy using. I challenged myself to write 300 words in 5 minutes, and ended up writing 156, which isn't bad considering I struggled with writer's block half the time. My outline still hasn't been made, which makes things much more difficult.

Tomorrow I will try to write for 1 hour, broken into 15 minute chunks, divided into 5 minute intervals. We'll see how that goes.

My recent lack of productivity was caused by a bought of Shiny Object Syndrome, which I'm starting to break out of. :p

See you tomorrow.

Joshua Rigley

Day 9

Today I started working on the world map for my fantasy world, and it's proving to be harder than I thought/would like it to be. I may have made the world map too big for a first fantasy world, so I may start over and make it much smaller so it isn't difficult to fill out the details.

Didn't write anything today. I may not write anything for a while, since I'd like to focus some of my efforts on world building and outlining.

That concludes today. See you tomorrow.

Joshua Rigley

Day 10

Didn't get much writing done, but had an idea to set up a tool that could help a lot with writing my novel. I'm still in the process of getting everything set up, which may take a while, but I'll let you all know how it goes.

See you tomorrow.

Joshua Rigley

Day 11

Sorry about that brief hiatus. Today I wrote over 300 words and completed one scene for my novel. Here's how today went down:

I started out pretty rough, and didn't improve at all until later this evening. That's when I stumbled across this Udemy course: https://www.udemy.com/killingbob/

I had seen this course before, but for some reason, it seemed like right now was the perfect time to get it. So I did. I'm extremely happy with buying it. It's one of the few courses that I've bought that has forced me to take action.

In the beginning of the course, the instructor has you set a goal and has you complete the first step of completing your goal. That's when I wrote the scene.

Now, here's how I actually wrote the scene. I started out by making a list of scene ideas in Notepad (Invent a spell, guild duel, etc.). After I created a list of ideas, I picked the one I liked the most and tried to make an outline for it, which proved to be very difficult for me.

So, instead of writing an outline, I visualized the scene as if I was the character in the scene. Almost like playing a movie, except I tried to engage all of my senses. I acted as my character would have acted, searching frantically for some paper so he could write out a spell idea.

Then, I took a pen and paper and recorded what was happening in my head. That was my scene outline. After I did that, I opened up OpenOffice, and started to write out the scene, but quickly realized that it was bringing out the inner-editor in me (due to the auto-complete feature) and switched to OmmWriter instead.

Looking back, I think it would have been better if I had skipped writing a summary on paper, and instead wrote the scene directly in as much detail as possible, showing exactly what the character was going through and including as much sensory detail as I could. I think I'll try that next time.

Long story short, I have found writing fiction is much easier for me when I roleplay inside my head and go through the story as if I was in it, and then simply record what I see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Much easier that way.

Also, inside the video course I mentioned before, the instructor mentioned this really cool blog: Leading a better life - Quora

I haven't gone through all of the posts yet, but my favorites so far are "How to master your life" and "Become a graphics designer in 5 minutes". I think I may be picking up a copy of "The Sims" soon. I love video games, and I like the idea of learning valuable life lessons from a video game.

That's everything. See you guys tomorrow.

Mr Bill

What happened in the end Joshua? Did you end up finishing this? I'd like to read it if you have.