Write Your Novels Faster: Sacrificing Formatting Early

Note: This is the 1st part in a 5-part weekly series on How to Write Your Novels Faster.


Part 1: Sacrificing Formatting Early
Part 2: Visual Representations of Your Novel's World
Part 3: Plotting With Your Table of Contents
Part 4: 7 Ways to Get Over That Writing Wall
Part 5: Editing and Proofing Your Novel Fast

Every writer wants to know how to write faster. I can write a novel a month, plan to do so most months this year, and have done so in the past.

I start my books in the middle of a scene with a line of dialogue and let the characters go. Oftentimes I'll have an idea of what's going to happen, but not always. I try to get one part of 5 to 7 chapters, which may not even be the first part.

After that it’s really just word count goals, like below:

• 10,000 Words: Once I can get up to 10,000 words I'll put my title page in there and start the TOC. I'll name and write chapter headings for the other 4 to 5 parts (sometimes just 2 for short books) and then write out a few paragraphs of ideas for those chapters. I'll color these in red or blue to separate them.
  

• 20,000 Words: When I get up to around 20,000 to 30,000 words I'll usually hit a wall. I'll give it a line-edit, usually giving myself an extra few thousand words as I write out some of those earlier colored paragraphs and add things here and there. I rarely get rid of anything.
  

• 50,000 Words: After that it's just filling out those parts until I get to my predetermined word count goal, which I usually set before even writing (these range from 20,000 words for short novelettes to 60,000 words or more for full novels). Personally I find that I hit a wall with my writing about every 20,000 words, so that’s a great time to go back and do a line-edit – it often gets you back on track!
  

I skip around a lot and write what feels write, leaving the boring stuff for last, which I then try my best to find ways not to include.

Sometimes I might need to do another line-edit when things stall again. After awhile thought it's just fighting to get those last bits and work things up.

I try to come up with and write the ending to my novels around 20,000 to 30,000 words in, and that way I'll know it and can go back and change it later. Also, it makes some of those holes in your story magically fill up!

Below are some basic things I do when I write novels. I follow many of these same things when I write non-fiction, although here we’ll really get into the formatting that I follow for all of my Amazon published novels. You can use this format for Amazon, or whatever works for you.

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Making It Feel Like a Book Early

I shoot for 10,000 words of just ideas, different chapter starts…whatever really, before I even start to think of my work as a book. When I get past that 10,000 word hump I start thinking of releases and marketing and I know I’ll finish.

It’s a psychological hurdle you need to get over, and here are some things you can do to make you Work in Progress (WIP) seem like something that can actually get finished.

TOC and Title Page

Once I get enough words, usually around 10,000, I’ll go ahead and put in a Title Page and a Table of Contents (TOC). Both of these make it feel like I’m writing a book, which is important psychologically when you still have tens of thousands of words to churn out.

I also like the TOC, hyperlinked like mine is, because it makes for easier navigation. I like to skip around and write what feels good, like I talked about in Writing Blocks vs. Puzzles, and this approach works for me.

Formatting for Amazon As You Go

It’s always easier to format as you go, but I usually don’t start doing that until I get up to around 10,000 words, sometimes more. A lot of times when you’re starting out it’s just better to write a lot as fast as you can. When you get a big pile of words you can begin to go back and sort through them.

Below are a couple pages of what my novels usually look like while I’m writing them. I really just write, hit ‘return’ a few times when I need a new paragraph, and continue.

You can see here that I’m writing the novel in block format style. I have basic formatting going, although I put Bookman Old Style font in place for something a little friendlier to look at.

Now, what I sacrifice in quality to gain time and words I then have to go and fix later. The next sections will detail how to make the above pile of words into a presentable and up-loadable Amazon Kindle novel.

Making Good Amazon First Line Indents

When I get up to around 20,000 words or so I’ll usually go back one night when I’m feeling pretty tired and don’t want to write anymore and clean that all up.

I’ll go through and delete out all those extra returns you see, then I’ll Select All and give it a First Line Indent. When I’m done with that I’ll go back to those parts I don’t want indented, like the title page and TOC, and get rid of it.

This will give me a nice first line indent that will make my pages easier. See, we’re just formatting as we go, making it easier when we finally get those last sentences finished. Then most of this headache stuff is done.

So now I’m just going to go through and manually delete all those returns. I suppose you could do Find/Replace with this, but I use it as a chance to just give everything a good once over. I want the sentences to look right.

Once I’ve done that I’ll have that huge block of text that just looks bad. I’ll Ctrl+A to Select All and then simply go up to my spacing shortcut on the bar up there and hit 1.5 spacing. This will give me something like this:

Indenting Your Amazon Titles Properly

I like this look a lot better and it’s the format I submit to Amazon when I publish novels. It also makes it easier to write the rest of my work and I like that it gives me a higher page count – kind of a psychological bonus.

Notice that the ‘Chapter 2’ title looks a little off, so I’ll go ahead and take out that first line indent on it to make it centered.

What you have to remember is that Amazon will often take that back out and indent it anyway, so if you’re doing a non-fiction book set all of your Amazon indents to 0.01, which makes it so you can retain that block formatting. I didn’t figure this out until my 5th or 6th non-fiction book and regretted it.

Now, today we pretty much just focused on what you can do to write quickly without worrying about all those formatting headaches while you’re doing it. Going back at a certain point to correct those is worth it, in my opinion, if it means you can get up to that 10,000 or 20,000 word mark.

Many people can’t do that, so I’d just sacrifice the good looking manuscript notion for substance. Remember, you’re the only one who’s going to see it, unless you write a blog post about it like I just did.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss Visual Representations of Your Novel and how this can help you get a lot more words out, especially after you’ve hit a wall with your writing.

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