One weird trick to write a novel in just 15 years

This week I sent the third draft of my debut novel to an editor, and it’s finally to a state where I can evaluate it as a whole thing, rather than just a patchwork of pieces. There’s more to do but I like where it is now. This is a new experience for me. I struggled with this book for years and thought it might be useful to explain how I finally got to a draft. Before too much longer the hope is to report agent representation and a publication date, but one step at a time.

Cast your mind back to Obama’s first term. I’m on a email list for people who are interested in John Milton, and back in 2011 the list discussed modern poems that are about Milton or Paradise Lost. This brought up an Australian poet, AD Hope, who wrote this really weird sonnet imagining a scenario where Eve fell but Adam didn’t. This idea stuck in my mind, and I started thinking about an immortal, self-righteous man existing in a world that has partially moved on.

I thought this was a great setting for a story, but couldn’t figure out what the actual plot would be. I wanted to write this book, sometime, when I was less busy. Then I had a kid. I had a regular job. I tinkered with plots. I had another kid. I tried to set up blocks of free time to sit and think. It didn’t work. I didn’t know where to start. I imagined individual scenes but couldn’t connect them. I spent a decade not writing this book. I tried Pomodoro and other methods for beating procrastination. I made resolutions. I bought a task timer. A global pandemic happened. My procrastination on the book never totally took over my life and forced me to rock bottom, so I was able to rationalize it. On a daily basis it was OK if I didn’t figure it out and make progress. On a yearly basis it was less OK. And on a decade basis it was the start of a life-defining failure. And in early 2023, out of frustration and desperation I made the following commitment:

From now on I’m going to sit and type like a monkey at a keyboard for at least 5 minutes per day, and see what happens.

And that worked. Sitting and thinking didn’t work for me. I had to literally type without knowing where it would go. I know some writers like to plan things out beforehand (GRRM’s gardeners vs. architects model), and tried for a long time to be a planner before giving it up.

Sometimes the 5min stints became three hours of productive creation. Sometimes they were 4:59 of utter unusable dreck. I did 5min stints on my computer, phone, and notepad. I wrote in the car and on the plane, sitting on the toilet and sitting next to my kids’ beds. No matter what else the day contained, I could fit 5min of typing. The results weren’t all great sentences, and they didn’t all fit together. But the repetition, the commitment to reengaging with this imagined world, set me up to understand it better, and the words on the page gave me something to react to. Scenes coalesced. In a year I had a first draft. The revision has been slower—both due to true extenuating circumstances and because this short-burst technique is harder to apply to revisions—but I’ve made consistent progress.

This may not suit you. There are as many ways to write as there are to make love. They won’t each suit everyone. But this one worked better than anything else I’ve tried, and it got me to a point where I have something I can call a manuscript. A commitment to 5min of daily busywork really changed the whole trajectory of my writing life.

If you’re trying to write, I hope you find a method that gets you where you want to go.