TYLER
TILLERSON
.COM

Let me be the first to say I am not an efficient writer. (The jury is out on if I’m even an effective one.) As I’ve come to the ‘end’ of Guardian and begun turning my focus towards restarting the cycle with Apex, I have been stewing on the notion of ‘writing efficiently’.

To that end, I wanted to share a brief journey (mine) and what I hope to learn from it. To do that, I’m going to show you how long it took to make Guardian. I do not share with out of pride – far from it – but out of a desire to share how I (try to) learn from my own work.

Writing Guardian, Part I: January 26, 2023 – January 2, 2024

Yikes. That is a loooong time to work on a book only 125k words long. Of course, I spent more than double that working on a book that never made it out of the first draft! Suffice to say, writing efficiently is not a trait I’d ascribe myself. So, what happened?!

Well, for starters, I didn’t actually start on The Wildlands until October 10th, 2023. From January to then, I did two things: I wrote a brief summary in two days then focused all of my efforts on salvaging SPHINX, the aforementioned book that never made it. The idea of The Wildlands had been bothering me since the holidays of 2022, and I resolved to write it down as a brief summary with the intent being that it would not trouble me anymore.

Suffice to say, that did not work. Instead, I still didn’t get SPHINX sorted and, more importantly, I also became a father. Coupled together, I was effectively a writer in self-proclaimed-name only. I ended 2023 confident that this writing thing would never work. I was depressed, I was anxious, and above all, I was defeated.

Writing Guardian, Part II: January 2, 2024 – November 5, 2024

At the start of every year since I began pursuing wrtiting as a career (2019), I have always written an essay to myself with the prompt, “Why do I write?” Those essays tell quite a story of early excitement, passion, followed by difficulty, and ending in sorrow. The 2024 essay reads like a farewell letter. (I’m rather excited to write 2025!)

And yet, the end of 2023 saw me finally shelve SPHINX and really give The Wildlands a chance. My attitude could not have been worse.

What the hell, why not? If it flops it won’t be a surprise, at least.

This was in reference to even finishing the book – not its actual commercial success, which of course remains unknown – but there was a small part of me that refused to give up and a very big part of my life – my wife – that refused to let me give up.

I finished the first draft by February 28th. I was beyond astonished. Two months, and I had done what I had spent four years trying to do with a different story. It took me until the middle of April to start on the second draft, the intervening weeks filled with world building and plot-hole-filling as I designed the second draft’s outline.

The second draft was done on June 5th. The third, and final, draft would be edited and corrected right up until November 5th. Just eleven days before the book launched. Hardly the way it is supposed to go, but there it is. The final correction was a stupid one, too: I had forgotten to update the table of contents in Word…so the page numbers were all wrong in the print editions. E-Books, thankfully, don’t suffer from the same problem.

In less than a year, I’d done it: I’d built a book (and all the ancillary things that go with it, like this website) and made it available for sale. As I write this, I am amazed, confounded, and a tad ashamed. Amazed that I did it, confounded that I did it, and ashamed that I really did try to give up. I had created a writing process and it worked. Except…

It worked but it won’t work forever.

Now we get to the meat of this post: as I begin my work on Apex, I’ve made it a point to step back and really look at what I did right, and wrong, along the way. Yes, I’m also trying to bask in the joy and pride that comes with actually finishing the book, but it is important to me that I do it again and again. Every writer has a process and, for the first time, I can genuinely observe mine from start to finish.

In doing so, I also can begin to create goals and timelines that I did not have before. I had no idea how long Guardian would take when I started…I only had one goal: finish it by the end of 2024. (Hence the close call between edits and launch.) I cared for nothing else, not even its marketing or initial sales.

I just wanted to be done. To actually do it. To know I could do it.
That mentality got me to here, but I know it won’t work in the long run.

The trick, I quickly surmised, was that I needed to figure out how to write more efficiently. I do not mean words per minute but the process itself: idea, outline, drafting, editing, publication. In looking back at how I wrote Guardian – and why I was able to write it at all – I discovered that some parts of that process are sorely in need of examination, while others are quite fine.

Examining the process behind Guardian

1. Idea: January 26, 2023 – February 22, 2023
2. Outline: February 22, 2023 – October 10, 2023
3. Drafting: October 10, 2023 – June 5, 2024
4. Editing: June 5, 2024 – November 5, 2024
5. Publication: November 17, 2024

Immediately, it’s easy to see there was an extraordinary amount of time lost in the idea and outlining phase. This is, in no small part, due to a combination of mental health and becoming a father. Writing took a backseat during these two periods.

As in, I didn’t write at all.

After that, the drafting of Guardian was approximately eight months long and its editing another five months. Herein lies a lot of room for improvement. That said, it bears mentioning I was also launching a new Patreon page, then later this website, and learning about the fifth stage of the process: publication. Much of that is a fixed cost in time that (hopefully) won’t affect Apex.

I was, and still am, particularly surprised at how much ‘alternative’ knowledge I had to acquire to publish: HTML and CSS for EPUB documents, being a fine example. All of this was time not spent on the book itself. Yet publishing a book, especially as an indie-publisher, is far more than the craft of writing. The ‘business’ of what I do dramatically expanded from what I had expected into what I now do, and I had to make time to educate myself in it and will likely continue to educate myself for years to come.

What does ‘writing efficiently’ look like to me?

Beats me. I’ll let you know if I get there! Really, though, I do have some ideas: starting with a basic goal of how long I want Apex to take:

Seven Months.

• Idea: One Week. This part is already done, in no small part because I had to think about Apex a lot towards the end of Guardian.
• Outline: Two Weeks. I’ve actually done this, too, amazingly. The first week was rough getting it all down, but then I was able to spend the second week picking at it and adjusting. I identified from writing Guardian that a lot of why I finished the first draft as quickly as I did was because I had a solid outline, something SPHINX never had.
• Drafting: Uhhh…

Drafting is, by far, the most time-consuming part of the process. This makes sense, of course: you’re writing the book! I typically keep chapters between 2,700 and 3,500 words and, on a good day, I can write an entire chapter. (On a really good day, I can write two or three, but those are rare. I have a wife and son who want to see me, afterall.)

• If the outline calls for 48 Chapters that is, theoretically, 48 days of writing. I don’t account for days I write extra because I have just as many days I don’t write well (or at all) due to life. 48 days / 5 Day Work Week = 10 Weeks (rounded up) to complete one draft. Two and a half months.
• If I stick to my process of two drafts and a final draft focused on editing, it will take five months just to write the story and have it finished in terms of content.

Oh, dear. That only leaves two months for editing and publication! Except…that should be fine, right? When I look back at editing Guardian, a lot of those five months in editing weren’t editing at all:

I was building two websites, registering with seven different storefronts, and consuming an inordinate amount of literature on formatting, web design, and publication standards.

For those that haven’t already figured it out: I don’t have a formal education in writing, editing, nor publishing. I have an education in history and human resources. Both fields that are great at producing unnecessary paperwork. Anyways…back on track:

• Drafting: Five Months. Two and half for each draft, assuming no chapters are copied over (which is unlikely, so that’s a little cushioned) and approximately a week for identifying and fixing plot holes prior to editing.
• Editing: Two Weeks. Having solid outlines meant that editing Guardian really was simply correcting bad spelling, grammar, and ensuring uniformity of language. It’s tedious and time-consuming, but it is straight-forward.
• Publication: Two Weeks. This rolls into editing somewhat because I have to get proofs in my hands and ensure I didn’t miss anything before prints go on sale.

Add it all up, and that is six months and three weeks! Of course, it is also entirely hypothetical. Primarily in that I have no idea how much writing I’ll be getting done in the very busy months of November and December!

The greatest unknown remains drafting. There’s a saying about mice and men, and outlines may as well have been included in the quote. I rewrote SPHINX‘s outline countless times, to no avail, and it took two months to settle Guardian‘s second outline because, suddenly, I realized I was going to finish the book, which meant I had to think about the next book, too!

Cue your favorite Ryan Reynolds meme. Why? Why focus so much on writing efficiently? Besides the obvious (more books in less time leads to more sales and money in less time), there’s a deeper purpose for me: Burn out.

When I look back past Guardian to SPHINX, I realize I was burnt out. Not on writing, but the story itself. I felt it, somewhat, towards the end of Guardian, too. I had never appreciated what more accomplished writers have mentioned for centuries: that the closer a writer gets to finishing their work, the more they dislike it.

I love my book. I’m thrilled to be writing the series – finally – but I also am so done with Guardian it’s become a joke at the dinner table. It has gone from feeling like this herculean task of epic adventure to the annoyance of chasing the latest housefly to infiltrate the living room. Stephen King once said, “To write is human, to edit is divine,” and I find I must agree, because editing requires patience only God might appreciate.

Writing efficiently keeps up momentum as well as passion and excitement. It goes back to the notion that it is better to get something done right than never finish it for want of it being done perfect. That is precisely why I didn’t finish SPHINX: I wanted it to be perfect, from the first draft, and therefore could not write it because…not surprisingly…I am not a perfect writer. Nor will I ever be.

So…Apex will be done before September of 2025?

Boy, I sure hope so. That would be amazing! Genuinely, if I can get my writing process down below ten months, I’ll be thrilled. My long-term goal is to be able to publish two books a year that I might be able to alternate between two series.

Yes, I have other series ideas – SPHINX among them – that I hope to bring to the page someday. Make no mistake, I’m not in a hurry to write all of that. It has more to do with that goal being a vision I’d be proud to realize.

Apex will be published before the end of 2025, of that I am certain. (I’m rather terrified to write that, here, in a public space.) I spent years promising myself I’d finish a book ‘this year’, and Guardian is the only time it has happened! Yet it did.

I’m hoping to do it again. More efficiently, too.

Miela er fen.
-Tyler

Do you have questions about writing or writing efficiently? Ask in the comments or send me a message via the About the Author page.