15 Minutes a Day = A Book In a Year

In order not to lose my first drafting momentum during a revision week, I set aside 15 Minutes a day to draft original material. In those 15 minutes, I am able to write 1 to 1-1/2 pages (250 to 350 words). At 1 page per day or 250 words, even if a writer first drafted only 300 days out of the year, a writer could finish a 75,000-word novel.

My former mindset was that I needed larger chunks of time to be able to focus on my writing. Say three or four hour blocks set aside just to write, which with working full-time plus, of course, never happened.

I see now that this all-or-nothing thinking was a skewed mindset and that I robbed myself of a great deal of writing experience, because at 15 minutes a day, an entire first draft of a novel could be completed in the span of a year.

In order to be able to focus on those 15 minutes, a few hours (5 to 10 hours) of preplanning upfront (1-Page Character Sketch, Character Growth Arc, GMCD chart), and 10 minutes every few days of making a bulleted possible-direction list for the chapter ahead, and a writer would be set to focus on first drafting.

15 minutes a day! Such a small amount of time in our busy schedules. Even with working on average 60-hour workweeks, I could have worked in 15 minutes of doing something I truly wanted to do and that meant so much to me.

So, don't you want your 15 minutes?