I wrote a 20,000 word story during lockdown while working 9–5
Eight weeks. 20,000 words. 20% pay cut. Wishing I had something that couldn’t be taken away from me.
This advice is for the 9-5ers out there who want to make something happen, but don’t have the time.
Receiving the news that I would get a 20% pay cut during lockdown was honestly alright, compared to other people’s job loss stories. But I had to work extra hard during most of those eight weeks to meet competing deadlines, while facing mounting stress and experiencing burn-out at the end of the day.
The only self-inflicted pain amongst all of this, was that I had decided to write a 20,000 word story by the end of lockdown.
Now, a small disclaimer: I’m not smart enough or knowledgeable enough to earn passive money, like a lot of writers on Medium are. All I know is how to work for someone, how to adapt to changing circumstances, how to improve, and how to not give up until a problem is solved. I am (sometimes) lazy, enjoy sitting on the couch and watching TV. I am a mixture of some of the most unproductive traits that humans have and yet I still managed to write a 20,000 word story. How?
It was one of the most excrutiating things I’ve ever done, mentally, and physically, but I’m glad I did it.
I wrote 1 hour before work and 1 hour after work
The hour before I got up, was the best time for jotting down fresh ideas that popped out of my head. The hour before going to sleep was the best time to flesh out those ideas.
I stopped re-reading everything
One of the reasons why I’m not a successful writer is because I want everything to sound so perfect that I would never end up finishing anything. Don’t be like me. Write and move on. Write and move on. 1000 words can easily become 10,000 words if you just write and move on.
I used Google Doc’s heading styles to break down my chapters
Once I had a few thousand words written down, things started to get really messy. I found that I often had to go back to a chapter to fill it out, but that chapter was somewhere way up on page 5,while I was way down on page 20. I started styling my chapter headings using Google Doc’s heading styles. For chapters, I used Heading 3. This allowed the headings to show up in the…
