TRANSCRIPT: S04EP01 Writing a Book in a Year

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Hello! It’s 2025, and you’re still listening to Hyba Is Writing. I’m still your host, Hyba, and today’s episode is all about a specific new year’s resolution that you might have as a writer: writing a book in a year.

If that sounds like something that’s interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter, and you’ll be able to download your free copy of the book in a year guide, which will help you get organized so that you can, in fact, finish a book in a year.

In this episode, I want to walk through the general idea behind the guide, and to give you a little bit of additional guidance as you create your own goals and schedules.

So, the book in a year guide was something that I personally wanted to create not just for writers everywhere but also for myself. I’m a bit of a weird personality when it comes to scheduling myself, because a lot of the tried-and-true methods that people swear by simply don’t work on me. Things like blocking out time in your calendar, or creating daily to-do lists, or announcing deadlines so that I have to meet them, and so on. I’ve since made my own method and my own workflow process which, after a lot of trial and error, has become something of a powerful organization and productivity method for me.

This year, just like every other year, I wanted to make sure that I was going to complete a full book before the end of the year. I wanted to figure out how I could go about doing that, and I realized that one of my biggest issues was just time management. I often have what I call Hazy Days, where I end up a victim of something I call the Haze because on those days, I have no particular goal, direction, or aim, so time seems to slip through my fingers, and the next thing I know, it’s time for bed and I’ve done nothing and I feel extremely frustrated and unsatisfied.

I realized also that the best way for me to tackle this is to create some kind of goal for the day. I knew that to-do lists don’t work very well for me, and I can’t go about blocking my day, even on the morning of, because that’s just a sure-fire way to make sure I actually don’t do anything that I’ve planned. So, how to trick this brain of mine into actually getting work done?

The first thing I have to do is create flexibility. In other words, I can’t tell myself that I have to do this very specific task today or tomorrow or whenever because then I don’t feel like doing that task, and I want to work on pretty much anything else. But, if I tell myself that I just have to complete a task out of a number of different tasks today, I’m more likely to get something done and be productive.

And thus, the book in a year guide was born. The book in a year guide isn’t about how to write a book. It’s about how to manage your time to write a book, and it invites you to do this by working backwards. You know, right off the bat, that there will be days that you won’t be able to write. These could be holidays, family days, birthdays, anniversaries, weekends – whatever. There are days where we’re simply unable to write for a range of reasons. So the first thing the guide asks you to do is to mark those days off – get them off your calendar.

Then look at all the other days that you can write, and count how many writing days you have. Obviously, you’re not counting days where all you’re going to do is write. You’re counting days where you can fit in a writing session, so really this is more like counting your writing sessions. This is a great place to start. Some of us will have over 100 days, and some will have much less than that; that’s not an issue, it’s simply what you’re able to budget out, and you need to work within those constraints rather than against them.

Once you have your number of writing days, consider how many writing sessions you can fit per day, how long they can be, and how much you can write in that period of time. Then, do the math and find out how many words you can probably write in a year.

For example, I can say that most days, I can write for thirty minutes when I wake up in the morning, and I can write for maybe an hour maximum before bed. That’s not going to be every single day though, so to keep it conservative, I’m going to have just two thirty-minute sessions per day. I can probably write about 500 words per half hour, but let’s be conservative again, because we all know there are days when the words just aren’t flowing, so we want to average it out. Let’s say I can write 300 words in half an hour, then. If I have 100 writing days in my year, and I’m writing at least 600 words per writing day, then I’m looking at a 60,000 word manuscript at the end of the year.

Obviously, there will be days when the words are flowing, or when I’ll have more time to dedicate to my writing, and instead of writing just 300 words in a session, I’ll write 500 or more, or instead of writing for one hour in total, I’ll be able to add another half-hour session to my day.

We want to work with the minimum possible amount of writing you could probably do, though, so that at the very least, that’s a scenario that you can look at and say, Well, okay, so if I’m struggling to write every single writing day this year, and I’m only able to write for the minimum amount of time that I can provide myself per day, then at the very least I can still end up with X number of words by the end of the year.

The idea is to then take that number, whether it’s 25,000 words or 200,000 words, and figure out what kind of a project or book you want to create with it. A novella? A short story collection? A novel? Maybe you’ll even be able to do two things – but don’t overload yourself on your first year using this method; try to keep your options open, so that you can better assess how much time you may need moving forward.

So, yeah! That’s the idea behind the book in a year guide, and if you want to download the PDF which has some more guidance and resources, you should definitely head on over to my newsletter and sign up. I’ve got it linked on my blog, so you can go straight to hybaiswriting.blogspot.com and find it in the banner menu. The newsletter is a google group, which I know is a little strange right off the bat, but it will function exactly like a newsletter, with the added benefit of having a page you can visit whenever you want to find a specific email or link again, so that’s a nifty feature that keeps your inbox clean, too.

That’s all I have for you today! Thanks for tuning in, and I hope you have an awesome day or night. Now go forth and scribble away.