The 24-hour Writing Challenge: Don't Try This at Home · 9:37pm Jun 21st, 2022
A few years back, I had a series of extremely bad writing ideas. Call them the worst possible ideas, and you might not be wrong.
The first of these is simply too insane to be constrained by the physical universe (yet, I have to master dictation before I can pull it off and I still haven’t swallowed that frog yet) However, the second of these ideas seemed achievable. To succeed would be to push my writing ability and physical discipline to the breaking point. What would it take to write for 24 hours straight?
That means exactly what it sounds like. Write every hour for an entire day. The goal would be to maintain a relatively low wordcount for me (1k per hour average) for the entire duration. I would allocate myself a few minutes off for exercise, meals, and basic tasks to be a human. To be precise, a total of 4 30 minutes breaks, totaling 2 hours, spread throughout the day.
Yeah I know that means it’s technically 22 hours of writing. No hate, I may be a writing machine but I’m not a literal machine. If it helps, those breaks will not be contiguous, so there will be writing during each of the hour blocks. I thought if I was going to go through as much suffering as this will entail, I ought to share the journey so that others could come along for the ride.
I write this before I start, so as to accurately capture my feelings before everything begins. So let’s get specific!
What are you doing?
Sleep in to a comfortable 11am. I’m going to need every drop of rest I can get for the hellmarch waiting ahead.. Wake up, begin writing with 10 minutes. Continue writing until 11am the next day, with a total of 2 hours of break time to be allocated as desired. Move locations and writing techniques to stay productive. Minimum goal = 20k. Why this number?
Because Brandon Sanderson wrote 19,000 words in one day. My previous daily wordcount maximum was 18k, and I think I can do better. Now is the time. I would be happiest if I keep up the average and somehow hit 22k, though I realize the human brain can only survive so much abuse. To keep that average I’ll need to score much higher earlier in the day, to make up for the slog that comes at the end when I’m melting into a pile of sludge.
This day in particular was chosen for a specific reason too. My father was the one to get me into writing, when I was still a little starscribe who couldn’t string words together. He passed tragically a few years ago. As such, there’s no one for me to spend father’s day with. I can, however, do something awesome with the time. I cannot fail.
How Do You Think This Is Possible?
Honestly I don’t know if it is. I’ve focused on writing before at the exclusion of all else, writing a novel in 3 days of rented hotel room seclusion. But even that isn’t actually 24 hours a day writing, much of that time is spent at resort pools and restaurants and seeing the local sites. 24 hour a day writing could not be sustained for that long.
I didn’t just blunder into the project, either. I made preparations, so this crazy day could be the most productive. That means a full outline for the story, which you can see below:
The story is a novella in the same universe (and with a similar scope) to the fairy stories I wrote previously. That means it’s a world I’m familiar with, and won’t be stopped short with lots of research. Aside from each of those scene cards, I’ve also outlined each scene in more detail, usually about 200 words of rough summary for the scene’s events.
Lastly, I made character sheets and a setting profile for each location in the story, that way they would be interesting an engaging--again, without needing to slow down to come up with them along the way.
Basically, the plan was to do all the mental work possible to make the story happen, except for getting the actual words down. That meant about 1500 words of scene outlines, for a story meant to be 20-25k long. It would be amazing to actually finish the whole story during the write, but I don’t know for sure if that’s possible.
Success will be measured not by completing the story in 24 hours (I’d rather it be good than be finished in an arbitrary window) but just by continuing to work for the full duration. I will not lower my quality standards intentionally to make goals, though I’m sure stricter edits for words written in that last window of 4 hours or so will be required.
Here we go! It's morning of, the time has started, and I've got writing to do! I'll keep what I put in the blog during the event to a minimum, so my wordcount can go where it belongs. Instead, here's a rough idea of how things are going:
And now it’s the next day, and there’s been some time to put my thoughts together about this crazy experiment.
How’d It Go?
I met and exceeded my goals! Rereading what I wrote, I couldn’t tell by looking at each scene how late in the process it got. I think the story will be great when it’s ready, some of my best work yet. But that’s always true, or at least every author would hope it is. Always learning and improving, always more skilled than the last time, after all.
In terms of mindset, I found that remaining focused and productive only really got hard a few hours after my usual bedtime. Before that, the fact that I had this big goal going and people knew about it created a background pressure that moved me towards high performance. There’s something magical about accountability, and I knew I was going to get asked each hour how things were going.
I noticed a few things about truly sustained creative workloads. I’ve never tried to do nothing but write for such a long period--it felt like more than 2 hours of ultra-focused productivity really isn’t what humans (or at least, this human) is wired to do from a creative sense. Getting words on the page isn’t like moving boxes, sooner or later the mental well is dry and needs to recover.
After hours where my productivity dropped to a crawl, I often noticed bursts of tremendous speed, which would gradually run down again as I kept up the pace. My writing app is able to separate the time I spend with the document just open from the time where words are actually being put on the page, and found a fairly huge discrepancy-- 15 hours of actual writing time, despite sitting at the document for 21 hours according to my pocket calculations of breaks I took.
This suggests something that should be obvious, I think. As interesting an experiment as this was, there are diminishing returns to 24 hours of sustained focus, the least of which was the health cost afterwards. I was a philosophical zombie the rest of monday, in ways that went deeper than simple sleep depravation.
It remains to be seen how the next few days of writing output will be impacted. I usually write between 2-5k a day. if I missed a week of writing because of this, then the experiment would actually be a net negative to my total word count.
I imagine a future experiment, tuned to remove the parts that worked the worst. Those last 4 hours were quite unproductive, even more than the chart shows. It was a lot of staring blank-faced at a document, with brief flashes of inspiration that allowed me to finish a scene, then stare blankly again for another hour. That’s not a good use of time, and they were damn miserable too.
Starscribe’s writing adventure 2.0: 43 hour challenge!
For my next attempt, I’m trying to come up with a way to actually get 24 hours of real writing time, not dead-faced staring into the yawning maw of death. So here’s the next attempt, with changes incorporated based on my previous experiment. It’s science, baby!
- Writing for too long has diminishing returns. 2 hours of writing is high speed, 3 starts to slow down, and 4 breaks my ability to focus completely.
- A break has to be long enough for the mind to recover. 1 hour after a long, productive writing session seems like a minimum. This break can’t incorporate consuming other entertainment (youtube videos, reading, etc) or else slow down the next session. Exercise, real world socialization, and time outdoors is best.
Trying to write too far past bedtime takes focus-enhancing drugs. Relying on adderall or something similar would probably work, but feels like it breaks the spirit of the challenge. No prescription nootropics allowed.
- Caffeine very much allowed because i don’t hate myself that much. Everyone drinks coffee so that doesn’t feel like it breaks the rules
Also, unless the challenge begins at midnight (something that would require changes to your schedule on the days around it), it is going to be spread across 2 days anyway. Given this, I imagine a better version of the challenge to look like this:
Writing 3 hour blocks, with a 1 hour break between each one, for example:
Technically this challenge takes place over 3 days. But I don’t really care about the technicality so much as the output, and it seems like it might be perfect. This one includes a full night’s sleep in the middle, adding another 8 hours to its total duration.
But there was no chance of a productive second group of writing blocks without having a good night’s rest, I think every author knows that. Technically the challenge is 43 hours long, but it’s the same amount of writing I was trying to do this time, just… hopefully possible for a human to achieve.
I’ll give my modified version of this challenge a test sometime in the coming months. Unfortunately it won’t be during a sustained period, so I won’t be able to break that 24 hour writing record I set with this challenge.
But given I would actually be remaining productive during the whole duration, with enough breaks in-between to keep my sanity from failing, I expect an output of 30k would be well within-reach.
I wonder what it would take to write an entire nanowrimo-length novel like this. Could you do 16k a day for 3 days? But no, I won’t fly too close to the sun on that one.
Wow, very interesting read. I envy you, and hope to try this one day, maybe next week?
There is a rare gene that lets you be perfectly functional with only 6.5 hours of sleep.
Lol, I feel I go crazy enough when I can stay focused for 3-5hours at once.
I uh. I don't think you should do this, it seems a bit much. How about you cut it down to 12 hours? It'd be a lot better for you.
I can't even imagine. Jeez, even though I like writing, I don't think I'd be able to produce anything good after more then a few hours of it. Good luck, value your health, I guess?
I can't do that. I tried to do an all-nighter once in college for a coding assignment. The next day (after sleeping all morning) I determined that I had not produced one usable line of code after 11PM that night. Finished it up in about two hours after my sleep.
Man's gotta know his limitations.
this reminds me of a YouTube video about someone who played a videogame for 30 hours straight, for a "speedrun" record.
Not for me, Starscribe. While I can stay awake for 48 hours at a time (and have done so, more than once), staying focused for that long will fry what remaining synapses I have.
Which reminds me, I really should get back to work on MV. Been burnt out, exhausted, and running to doctors for the past couple of weeks.
May fortune ever be at your side.
You are amazing!
Having the discipline to work that long is incredible.
Thanks to you, I am motivated to work more as well, but it won't be 24 hours straight, I can not yet replicate such a great feat.
I wish you great success and happiness in live!
...you scare me sometimes, Starscribe.