In order to complete my new research project, I need to raise my productivity threefold. Not forever, of course. Only for the next three months. Theoretically, it’s doable but it requires a serious lifestyle adjustment.
I’m very excited to try. The trick is to avoid a slow-motion change that consists in adding a couple hundred words to my daily total every few days. Instead, I go straight from 300 words to a thousand.
Hell yeah! You can totally do it, especially if you’re not teaching.
Stephen King and John Scalzi start writing first thing in the morning and stop when they’ve written 2000 words (the rest of their workday is reading, editing, email, etc.). Many of my writer friends have a daily quota of 1000 to 2000 words.
I think it’s absolutely feasible, for fiction, to have a full draft of a novel in three months.
I drafted my first novel last summer, then let it sit then edited it over winter break. It’s now being queried and I will draft the second one this summer. It will probably go easier since I’m over the first-timer hump. For me, how it worked is that I’d have 2-3 days or so with 2.5k or 3k of good flow per day, and then 1-2 days rest. Some others who are less feast/famine than me are happy with a daily quota of 1k or 2k words and then take the weekend off.
Good luck!
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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