Big warning up top here, which is that you are about to traverse into the innermost, anal-most corners of my mind in viewing the spreadsheets I used for writing a novel from 2019-2023…please form all the conclusions you’d like about my relationship with time and work and leisure and myself…you can assume they are all true…

(As a reminder, all of this is linked/published in Delia’s Publishing Doc, which is free for everyone to see and share beyond the confines Substack; I’m just publishing it here on the newsletter as well in case you prefer your info in chunks…)

The Little Spreadsheet:

Some people like to keep track of their wordcount (bc you need ~90K words for a novel manuscript), so I first started tracking that via this sheet (The Little Spreadsheet) after a few months of writing out of curiosity. (But it also helped me with the “one chapter/week” pacing, because it helped me figure out that I needed roughly 20 chapters if one chapter was ~2500 words, and that helped me with the outline / novel pacing itself )

The Big Spreadsheet:

Later, I started using this sheet to keep track of my work on an hourly basis. It turned out that I felt most productive when I started thinking of it as akin to a contract job — one where I had “billable hours” that I had to keep very close track of (you’ll notice the 0.25-hour increments….I was billing my 15 minutes ok!) This became how I started to structure my writing schedule: I would decide how many “hours” to allot to each task, over several months (averaging roughly 4-5 hours a week, picking up more “shifts” when I could but not feeling the pressure to if I was “on track” with whatever I was supposed to get done that week or month).

By giving myself quite a specific schedule—one that accommodated travel or moving apartments or whatever given the month—I could also plan “sprints” (periods of intense work, a thing I copped from BuzzFeed) with breaks, which incentivized me a lot more than like committing to an hour/day for years. This way, I also felt productive even if all I did for a day was stare at a screen and fix one sentence, though the time “limit” also helped me not be too precious. If I knew I only had a week to “fix” a certain problem, I would just try my best and then when time was up, it was time to move onto something else.

Everything is on the first tab "everything on one sheet,” but if you want to see how the hours/tasks were broken out over the ~6 stages of drafting/revising, you can also click around the Rounds 1-6 tabs to see what those looked like…

Some notes for you to navigate around this sheet (re: the tabs from right to left)

• Manuscript drafting - This is how I decided how much time and when to dedicate to writing the first draft. Note I scheduled myself a birthday break lol. It all originally started with a regular two-hour chunk on Saturdays around December 2019. My rule for myself was that I was not allowed to do anything on Saturday until after I’d hit my hours, except to exercise (a really interesting mind game to play with yourself: do I want to do this torturous but ultimately satisfying thing, or the other one). Then, if I hit my hours, I was allowed to do fuck all for the rest of the week, guilt-free. Until the next Saturday rolled around.
  
  This was, in retrospect, a decent way to start off. Once I had a few chapters (very) roughly drafted (an 11-hour job), I had a sense of my pace (about 3K words a week, or one chapter) and could chart out a deadline to work toward in order to get the whole draft done.
  
  I estimated it would take ~10 hours (about 5 weeks) to write a plot treatment for the rest of the novel. That process (helped in large part by the Save The Cat…Writes a Novel book) helped me figure out that I needed 20 chapters, so then I started apportioning those out over the next few months: March would be for drafting chapters 1-5, April would be for chapters 6-9, and so on.
  
  Obviously, there were weeks when a chapter took longer to finish, or when I wasn’t able to hit my hours. I’d move a writing block around, so maybe it wasn’t on a Saturday but a Sunday, or I’d pick up an extra “shift” by writing for a block on Tuesday night, for example. But I kept careful records of all the hours I spent on every part of the task, and that helped me feel a sense of achievement and accomplishment no matter how “good” the chapter was (AKA, really bad). Plus, giving myself a weekly deadline helped me not be precious at all about the actual quality of the writing or plotting. I just needed words on the page and to fulfill my “hours.”
  

• Round 1: Personal Revisions - This is the schedule / time log I kept for going through the manuscript on my own before sending it to my beta readers. After I finished this round of edits, I printed out a copy for each friend and also sent them a few questions to consider, such as “Does Audrey feel like a believable character,” etc. Also gave them gift cards for their time and a strict deadline.
  
  You can see that I scheduled a “sprint” for myself from August 22-29, wherein I worked on the book every day for a week—notice how my valiant attempts to do a four-hour chunk petered out after like, the second day. (In the later months/years, you will probably notice that I scheduled a nice break or two after such a “sprint;” these were very good for morale and motivation).
  

• Round 2: Beta Revisions - I had my beta readers mail their marked-up copies of the ms back to me, and then I went through all of their feedback. Once I finished here, I knew that the manuscript felt “ready” to send to my agents — only because at this point, I finally didn’t know what else the book needed. (I think if you have a ms and know there are still certain plot issues or things to fix, you should tend to that the best you can before sending out!)
  

• Round 3: Agent Revisions - After I signed with them, Caroline and Jade had plenty of notes and suggestions, so we took a few months to work on those edits together.
  

• Round 4: Editor Revisions - We sent the novel out on “submission” in May, and I had a book deal within a few weeks of that. By July, I had the initial edits from Anne Speyer, my editor at Ballantine Books (now at Scribner) in hand, and spent the summer and fall of 2021 working on them.
  

• Round 5: Line Edits - I used PTO plus the two-week holiday break at Vanity Fair to give myself a “book leave,” AKA four weeks where I worked on the book every day. Turns out, I really topped out at around 5 hours of working on the book per day…thought I was going to be crushing 8-hour workdays LOL. This was a really lonely time. I did not get out of the apartment nearly enough. But I used this time to address the meticulous line edits from the publisher, so it was a lot of sentence-level wrangling. My goal was to hit around 20 hours each week of this dedicated month, and so that allowed me to be a bit more flexible with myself on a day-to-day basis.
  

• Round 6: Final/Copy Edits -The easiest part. The publisher had a copy editor read the whole ms and then point out not only typos and misspellings but also continuity errors (such as “she’s inside when she says this, but on the next page she’s outside already?”). Wish I had started working on the “acknowledgements” earlier in the process, because at this point I was too fried to be as eloquent as I wished to be.
  

• Everything in one sheet: The simplest view of all this in one place!

So! When it came down to it, from the first minute I started the first Google Doc to the moment I approved the final proofreader queries, a total of 463 hours had passed, or really, 58 full work days, or roughly 12 weeks’ equivalent of working at a full time job.

Which is crazy because it seemed…much more than that? A real “how do you measure a life” kind of moment here. Obviously I wasn’t logging in all the daydreaming and general mental noodling that I was doing those years “off-hours,” but I suppose I really liked having this concrete number to look at and have a sense of how much I was putting into this project.

And maybe in a sick way, knowing that number and looking at these sheets can help make writing a novel less intimidating overall, because oh, it turns out it could just take about 3 months if you were to be perfectly locked-in with full-time commitment and discipline. Or roughly 2.5 years, if you are a little bit more human. Something to think about!

Once again, here’s the link to the entire publishing doc, with the spreadsheets embedded. Next up tomorrow: general advice, or What I Wish Someone Told Me Back Then (or maybe, more accurately, Advice I Wish I’d Listened To…)