using a goal funnel to write a book
(or several at once)
One of my favorite YouTubers, Alexis Kingsley, has introduced me to a lot of planning/strategy methods, but one of my favorites is the Time Funnel. (Here’s her recent video on it if you want a more detailed explanation.)
The concept is fairly simple: you figure out what you want your outcome to be, and then chunk it down into quarters, months, weeks, and days so you know exactly what you’ll need to accomplish to reach your goal. Periodically (probably weekly), you assess where you are and determine if you need to tweak your daily habits or your overall goal.
I’m going to use my current WIP, A Crystalline Frequency, as an example.
Overall Goal: finish the first draft of ACF by October 25th, 2024
If I can stick to my word count limit of 100,000 words, I have about 75,000 words left to write, and 2 months (9 weeks) to get it done.
That means…
Monthly Goal: write 37,500 words
Weekly Goal: 8,333 words
Daily Goal: 1,190 words
This is pretty reasonable (if you factor out that I’m working on another secret WIP and also wanting to get into Glitter & Gore’s sequel, haha), and having multiple check points to aim at is comforting to me. If I miss my daily goal, I can still reach my weekly goal, and if I miss my weekly goal, I can still reach my monthly goal.
You can use this method to give a realistic time frame to all the stages of the book writing process, from outlining to drafting to editing. I find it works best to create separate funnels for each part of the process, but you can start with an overall goal for the project (ex. Publish ACF on January 30th), estimate how long each stage will take (ex. 1 month for outlining, 3 months for drafting, 1 month for editing, 1 month for formatting/pre-launch prep (which is a pretty fast timeline, so figure out your own pacing and definitely give wiggle room since things often get in the way)), and then break down the months/weeks/days from there.
If the drafting stage of ACF goes to plan, the editing Time Funnel will look like:
Overall Goal: Edit ACF from December 1, 2024 - January 1, 2025
Weekly Goal (about 4 weeks): edit 25,000 words per week (I’ll probably do a chapter goal but I don’t know the chapter count yet)
Daily goal (31 days): edit about 3,200 words per day (again, I’ll probably do a chapter goal, likely 1-2 chapters per day…and the book might get longer than 100,000 words anyway but WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT)
From there I could create a small Time Funnel for the book formatting, but I usually just try to do that all in one or two days since I’m a psycho (and I find the Time Funnel works best for longer projects because it allows for multiple milestones).
Whether I’ll actually succeed in publishing ACF on January 30th remains to be seen, but it helps to know exactly what I would need to do to get there. And this way, I’ll know if I’m falling behind and I can reassess my goal.
I thought about creating a second Time Funnel for my secret WIP, but I think I’ll just leave that project as a little treat I’m allowed to work on if I complete my daily words for ACF.
If I were to work on two projects seriously at once though, I’d probably break it down and see how many words I’d need daily for each (ex. 1,200 and 800) and then my daily word count goal would be the total (2,000), but I might not work on both projects on the same day. Maybe I would do 3 days of the lower word count project (aiming for 2k per day) and then 4 days of the higher word count project (aiming for 2k per day).
But, for once, I’m not going to torture myself like that, and I’ll plan to seriously start working on the secret WIP in January. By then I should be working on Glitter & Gore’s sequel also (!!), and I’ll probably make another Time Funnel newsletter with how I plan to balance the two.
Quick weekly update:
I wrote about 5k of the secret WIP this week, and I’m almost done with “The Mudblood” one-shot. Hopefully I have less than 2k left for that, and hopefully I’ll finish tomorrow :)
Monday I’ll get back into working on ACF. I got some feedback from my husband about the first few chapters, so I’m feeling more confident about that, and I’ll start sending it out to beta (or alpha??) readers tomorrow!
Hope you all have a wondrous week <3