February 2007

Book In A Week: Threat or Menace?
by Jennifer Stevenson
www.jenniferstevenson.com

Jennifer Stevenson is the author of Trash Sex Magic released in 2004 through Small Beer Press. She has had stories published in a number of anthologies including Horns of Elfland, Women at War, and Fields of Blood: Vampires of the Heartland.

Book In A Week is one of those freak parlor tricks you hear about from time to time, along with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. 'Let's all write a novel in 30 days'). I first heard about it on GEnie, back at the dawn of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and a bulletin board didn't have to look like television. Steve Brust was collaborating with Emma Bull on a novel called Freedom And Necessity, and Steve was posting his page counts every day. 15 pages. 25 pages. 39 pages. 45 pages. I think his highest output in a single day may have been 75 but that could be just page-count-envy talking.

I didn't give it a thought.

Suckered in

Then I went to Romance Writers of America National Conference — might have been 2000 in Washington, D.C. April Kihlstrom gave a talk about Book In A Week. She inspired the hell out of me.

"Hold off your internal editor with a two-by-four. Lock her in a closet!" April said. "Stop second-guessing yourself and just write. Recapture the joy of pure creation. Write as fast as you can. Don't look at what you wrote yesterday. Don't read what you write ten minutes ago! It doesn't matter if it sucks. Because it's only one week!"

As she spoke, I realized it had taken me ten years to write four books. Among science fiction writers this is not contemptible, but on the Pink Side of the Force it simply isn't career-level output. I was very, very seriously unpublished at this point. I thought it was worth a try.

What it is

Simply put, Book In A Week means planning your week, planning your book ahead as much as your process will allow, and then writing as fast as you can. For one week.

If you have a sympathetic and supportive family, tell them that you are preparing a Book In A Week challenge for yourself. Arrange for meals, chores, and chauffeuring to be handled by someone else if possible. Prepare their minds to accept your unavailability for the week.

If you have an unsupportive family, don't tell them anything. Work around them. To that point, I think Book in a Week is better than NaNoWriMo because it's easier to get your family to do their own laundry and eat pizza for a week than for a month, and because it's much easier to procrastinate during a month than during a week.

If you do prewriting for a book — brainstorming, outlining, flash cards, spreadsheets, character grids, goal-motivation-conflict matrices, conflict crucibles, collages, what-have-you — you should get all that done before you attempt your Book In A Week.

Clear your schedule for that week.

Are you ready to write yet? If so, let's go.

Now you enter the actual writing phase. The watchword is: Don't Look Down.

During Book In A Week, suppress the self-editor who sits on your shoulder sneering at every word you type. Don't look at what you wrote yesterday. Don't look at what you wrote an hour ago. Don't edit what you have done. If you can't remember a character's name or eye color, fake it, write 'Moe' or 'purple', make a note somewhere to fix it later, and move forward.

This is you giving yourself permission to write what Delia Sherman calls The Good Parts Version. Don't worry about writing those transitions that get your characters from a drawing room in London to a haystack in Northumberland. Don't agonize over scene settings, unless those are your favorite parts. Cut to the juicy bits, the parts you've looked forward to writing since you first got the idea for the book.

So I tried it

I was halfway through a short 50K book at the time. I had a nice outline. I warned my husband I was going into deep writer headspace for the week. And I wrote like a madwoman for four days.

It was exhilarating. I was writing 25 pages a day. The funny scenes moved quickly, the sex scenes wrote themselves, and I found myself easily heaping disaster upon disaster on the heads of my poor characters. Writing doesn't get funner than that.

I finished the book.

I was so excited, I started the next book on day five and got forty pages into it by day ten. Two and a half months later, I had a completed first draft of the second book.

Of course, these were only first drafts. And in time it was necessary to expand those fifty-thousand-word novels into full-length, 100K novels. Picture me sweating and swearing over those revisions like any normal writer.

But I learned that, with adequate preparation, I could write one hundred pages in seven to ten days. And the momentum from that could carry me far, far into the rest of the book.

Okay, what's the catch?

Where does Book In A Week let you down? When you fail to prepare.

I found out the hard way on book three that I did not have an outline adequate to do Book in a Week. I didn't have my heroine sufficiently characterized — my besetting sin is starting a first draft with a heroine of straw. And by page one hundred I had the fine upstanding beginning of a world class clusterfuck. Confused, upset, baffled, I kept writing. Result: a 400-page doorstop.

At that point I hadn't written very many books, and I didn't know what my besetting sins and strong points were yet. And I hadn't really understood the importance of Kihlstrom's advice about preparation.

So I started another Book In A Week challenge on a fourth book, once again with a heroine of straw and an outline with distressingly frequent spots marked 'and then stuff happens.' I had half a plot and half a main character. And again, I hit the marshmallow plot wall.

Once again, I decided to blitzkrieg it. I would simply book-in-a-week my way through. If I keep writing through the woods, I reasoned, I'll eventually find myself back on the path designated by my outline, right?

Five hundred and fifty pages later, I typed The End. This book is still in a coma, under my bed.

So I learned the hard way, by writing two whole books without sufficient preparation, that for me preparation was everything.

Exposes your process weaknesses

Conclusion: Book In A Week can work brilliantly for a writer who doesn't outline. If you love to fly into the mist, beginning the great work solely with the scent of madeleines and a single word, Book In A Week can be the answer to your prayers. If you need better preparation, Book In A Week will expose corner-cutting brutally quickly.

That said, I'm still using this technique to jumpstart my novels. But I prepare, prepare, prepare. If I hit a pot-hole where my outline says, "And then stuff happens" …well, it's back to fix the outline. Once the outline works, I can resume fast writing.

Best of all though, I have the joy of feeling the pages pouring out of me.

Try it. As April Kihlstrom keeps reminding us: It's only one week. If all the pages suck and you have to throw them out, you've only lost a week. If they're fabulous, you're that much ahead.

April Kihlstrom has more tips and advice on her website.