As with any management or motivational tool, how we plan and monitor a Big Year is all-important. One of the major issues confronting me at the start of the writing big year was that I’d gathered, and was continuing to assemble, too much research information. Every attempt to write something engaging had gone nowhere. I needed a new mindset, so I boldly said: no more research, use your brain to cut through the thickets of information, and just write the damned book. Enter the 2016 Big Year: by December 31, through reckless courage and bold thinking, write a draft of all 20 chapters.
Of course I knew that would be tough, if only because prior arrangements, some clean-up work in January, and overseas visitors, etc., meant that 2016 at-desk time will only amount to just over six months. I worked out that all I had to draft each chapter was a week and a half. So be it, I yelled, and got cracking.
At the Big Year halfway mark, Chapter 1 is drafted and Chapters 2-4 are “nearly there.” I’ve spent some three weeks on Chapters 3 and 4, and eight weeks (yes, eight, not one and a half) on Chapter 2. A disaster.
But much good came from this half-year push. I now have a “plotting process” that winnows the piles of research and provides a blueprint for drafting. The analyse-then-plot-then-draft process grows clearer and quicker each time. For the first time in years, I can see the end of it all.
But how to rescue the Big Year? Or should it be abandoned? I grab some butcher’s paper and “think tank.”
