In July, I made a goal to complete the first draft of a new novel. I’d been working on a book for several months and I needed to finish it so that I could move onto other things.

So I increased the number of pages until I was writing 10 a day, sometimes even 15-20 pages when I was on a roll. I tracked my progress on Twitter.

Successful day: wrote 10 pages and a short-short, and finally finished painting the trim in the kitchen.

— Joy Lanzendorfer (@JoyLanzendorfer) July 23, 2016

Today was hard because of morning discouragement bomb, but soldiered through #writing 10 pages

— Joy Lanzendorfer (@JoyLanzendorfer) July 22, 2016

Wrote 10 pages despite insomnia. I think I'll finish the first draft of the new book this week.

— Joy Lanzendorfer (@JoyLanzendorfer) July 26, 2016

It was a harrowing time. I wasn’t sure I would make it, but on July 31st, I finished the first draft of the book. It is 151,000 words, 530 pages.

Since I made my progress public on Twitter, lots of people asked me how I was writing so many pages in a day. Here are some thoughts on that.

I can’t stress enough that this was a first draft. It will be a long time before I have a finished manuscript ready to send out for publication. For me, it’s easy to spit out a lot of words. It’s harder to edit them.

So, this draft is rough. Just because I wrote 10 pages doesn’t mean that they were all good pages.

I was motivated to finish because I took time off paying work. I put aside my day job–writing articles–to spend a month on fiction. I can’t afford to do that often, so I made the most of my time, not only writing this first draft but working on short fiction as well. When I plan time to write fiction, I take it seriously.

I used rewards to motivate myself. My writing buddy and I agreed that if we met our July writing goals, we would get a reward. That was doubly motivating because I wanted the reward and I didn’t want to let my buddy (okay it was Marcia) down. Now we’re going on a road trip!

I used markers to motivate myself. I find that visual evidence of progress is helpful, so I put a sticker by every completed bullet point on my outline and I made a dash on my notebook every time I finished a page, like so:

I also wrote my daily word count on my whiteboard. This is for July.

You’ll see I started on page 342 and finished on page 529.

The more I wrote, the easier it was to produce pages. When I started, writing this book was so hard that completing three pages was a decent day’s work. Then something clicked and I got used to writing a lot every day. It’s like any other discipline: You do something enough, you get used to it, and it becomes easier. It’s a shift in perspective.

Everyone works at their own pace. Several people contacted me saying they could never write this much this quickly. There’s nothing wrong with that. Every writer has a different process, and it doesn’t matter if you do 10 pages or 2 pages as long as you write regularly enough to make progress on your work.

Now this book will have a long rest before editing. I find that my fiction benefits from distance. Letting a draft sit for a period of time makes me more objective, which means that I can look at the book with clear eyes and have a higher chance of knowing what to do with it. Therefore this book is going to sit in a metaphorical drawer for several months before I pick it up again.

And that’s just fine… I have plenty of other things to write in the meantime.