How to Write a Novel in 10 Minutes
By douglas Weissman
A novel is long. It takes an average of 10 hours to finish reading a novel, so it would make sense that it would take over 10 hours to write a novel, but I wrote a novel in 10 minutes.
This isn’t a crazy scheme—or a lie. During the pandemic, I was working up to five writing jobs at a time. I wanted to spend time with my wife, with my baby, walk my dog, and see the light of day, even if only in my front yard. By the end of the day, after putting my daughter to bed, I barely had enough energy to eat dinner, let alone write a novel.
Up until that point, I had been a marathon writer, working on the page for hours at a time. If I didn’t devote at least two hours to writing at a given time, I considered it time wasted, or not enough time to get anything done. If I only had an hour, I would spend most of the time organizing my thoughts, or my workspace, researching random facts that I didn’t actually need, or trying to figure out the right song for the mood I wanted in the scene. Then I’d spend about five minutes staring at the blank page until the hour was up and I could return to ignoring my novel all over again.
Then a friend recommended we write together. She lives in a different city, and we decided that we could pop into a chat at the same time and keep each other accountable for showing up. We tried for an hour, but that timeline puttered out quickly. Then we tried a half hour. We couldn’t keep that stable either. She joined a writing group. The first week they would only write for 10 minutes. She asked if I wanted to try the same idea for the first week—a simple premise; write every day for 10 minutes a day. That was it. She showed up for 10 minutes for her writing group and another 10 minutes with me. I only showed up for our 10-minute sessions.
I took Saturday nights for myself, away from writing, away from thinking about my book. For six nights a week, I wrote for 10 minutes. At first, I didn’t think I would get much on the page. Then the timeline freed me up to write about anything, to forget my inner critic and just write. Instead of worrying about what I was writing, I was worried about the time: running out of it, wasting it. Instead of thinking I only had 10 minutes, I now showed up to work, even if only for 10 minutes.
Sometimes I had a prompt I could dive into immediately. Other times I knew exactly what I would write about. There were days when I just wrote to see how many words I could get on the page before time ran out, days when I challenged myself to complete an entire chapter in 10 minutes, days when I wrote just about characterization, and times when I explored setting, dug deeper into the tone of the story, and an entire week of 10-minute writing sessions when I just moved chapters around and looked at where they fit best within the larger plot structure.
The six steps you can use to write a novel in 10 minutes include:
Use a timer – don’t just look at the clock and think you will stop 10 minutes from that time. You will waste seconds looking at the clock wondering if you had hit your limit yet. A timer will sound when your session is over, and you don’t need to think about it after you hit start.
Use a prompt to get you started – If you don’t already have a novel in progress, or even if you do, a prompt can kickstart you’re writing because it gives you an idea to immediately work with, even if it has nothing to do with your novel initially. I used thematic prompts, I used circumstantial prompts, I even used a sci-fi prompt when I was writing about World War II, occupied Paris. I made it work. And those prompts that didn’t result in full chapters included inside the complete novel, still gave me scenes, sections, or ideas that I used elsewhere within the story. Nothing was wasted.
Choose the prompt at random – Choosing the prompt should not take hours; it shouldn’t even take 10 minutes in itself. If you nitpick your prompt, you are procrastinating. By choosing one at random, you aren’t wasting time on an element that doesn’t actually matter. What matters is the task of writing.
Challenge yourself – You can gamify your own writing. Find a time to write for 10 minutes at any time of day. Keep your streak going or challenge yourself to write 1,000 words in the 10 minutes. Find a challenge that both excites and scares you, one that is not too easily reached but is also not too farfetched. No one would actually believe if you wrote an entire novel in only one 10-minute session.
Find what works for you – 10 minutes worked for me but maybe only five minutes works for you. Perhaps you have more time and can devote 20 minutes to writing each day. I had very little energy or mental focus left by the end of my day to sit at my chair for longer than 10 minutes. I enjoyed what I wrote and felt re-energized after each session completed. The most important thing about those 10 minutes across six days was that it worked for me and my schedule. I could make time for 10 minutes.
Start immediately – Don’t wait until you find time. Don’t wait to start on a Monday. Start the day you read this, perhaps after you finish reading or later that night. Just like staring at a blank page, the longer you put off starting, the larger the task will feel or the more indifferent you will become.
It may sound hyperbolic when I say that I wrote a novel in 10 minutes but in reality, 10-minute writing sessions completely changed how I write and how I perceive showing up to write. I no longer demand hours at a time; instead, I suck every ounce of opportunity out of each second. It’s easy to scoff at the idea, to think that 10 minutes is not enough but then you take the challenge.
Ten minutes is more than enough time to write a novel, take a picture, share a story, soak up the sun, stand in the sunlight, or create a world. Ten minutes is all I need.
Douglas Weissman writes stories of friendship, of finding beauty in the grotesque, magic in the mundane; stories about building bridges, about burning bridges, about growing trees, about turning trees into bridges, and the ways strangers find common ground. He is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, daughter, dog, and cat. By the time you read this, he will probably have another cat. His latest novel, Life Between Seconds, was published by Histria Press in November 2022.