Is it possible to write a book in 100 days?
One of the most difficult things when writing is to actually finish the first draft. At least, to me, it was. I struggled for a long time, starting writing the novel, changing my mind about certain aspects about a quarter through, start over, same things happening again, and eventually, I gave up.
Thankfully, I became a member of the community on the Write Practice, which was already very helpful because you could post chapters, scenes, and short stories and receive feedback on these from other members, but they also offer several writing programs. One of these is ‘100 day book’. Here, you write the first draft in literally 100 days. While I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way I can write a book in just 100 days’, I signed up anyway, hoping for the best. And what do you know? I actually did finish my first draft in 100 days!
My experience with the program
If want to make clear here that this is my honest opinion of the program. If you decide to sign up for the program as well, I get no compensation for it whatsoever.
The most helpful for me were the tools you got beforehand. You had to hand in a plan for your novel, where you outlined what was going to happen in your book (before I wrote by the seat of my pants), and I had to set a goal and an intention for each day. For instance, the goal for my first draft was to write 80.000 words, and so I had to write 800 words each day at a specific time. I tried out some different times of the day until I found what worked best for me, and then the writing became easier.
Did I still change my mind about things I wrote a quarter in? Yes. Also halfway through, and many points after, but I kept writing. I made a note of it and just kept going as if I already changed it. It means my first draft doesn’t make much sense yet and needs a lot of reworking, but I already know what I want to change and towards the ending, it’s more and more how I wanted the story to go.
I was only able to do this because I had to post my progress every week. Every Friday, I posted my weekly wordcount, my total word-count, things that went well, things that didn’t go well, and what I could change next week to fix this. This accountability was extremely helpful for me, as it was confronting if I hadn’t written as much that week, so I wanted to make sure I had a nice word-count to show by Friday.
The community was also a big help. There is a special 100 day Facebook group full of authors going through the same things. There’s lots of encouragement from all the other authors there, which I think is one of the things that make the Write Practice so amazing.
Conclusion
So: if you are an author and you struggle with getting your first draft done, give this program a try! Yes, it does cost money, but I promise it’s worth it!
You can find it here: thewritepractice.com/writeabook
