Just keep swimming, just keep swimming

Still making steady progress, having added another 1072 words yesterday. Sometimes I find myself wondering how many of the words I'm banging out every day will survive into the second draft, but I suspect that such speculation is a threat to progress. After all, it's hard to justify writing words that may just end up on the novelist's equivalent of the cutting room floor. So let's not think about it, shall we? I am very close to 22% finished with the first draft, and that's something to celebrate!

Today, I would really like to get to what I feel is the end of the "first act" of the story, the point where the protagonist makes the decision that catalyzes the rest of the plot. I think I may be coming to it later than I should be, from a technical standpoint, and that may be something I have to correct in the next draft. But I have been pretty careful to make sure that every scene has actually moved the plot forward, so I do feel good about the plotting so far. And everyone who has read the draft has indicated that they are finding it gripping, so it doesn't seem to be a saggy story.

I don't know--maybe it's just fine. Who cares? I need a completed draft before I start dissecting the darn thing. Onward!

Back to the grindstone... thank God

Yesterday was a slow-starter. Most of the time I spent on the novel was applied to plotting in greater detail the next three big scenes. This was necessary because the plotting I've done so far has kind of been like planning a road and marking where I think it's going to go with little dots of spray paint. Then, as I actually write, I find the places where the ground is to hard to dig or there are obstacles that I don't want to try to write around, or I just find a better or more interesting direction.

In other words, writing can trump plotting, particularly when it comes to details. So where I ended up on the last big scene did not deposit the story precisely at the place that I had expected when I was plotting. Therefore, re-plotting was necessary.

Once I was ready to start writing, though, I found my reserves of enthusiasm were greatly depleted. This was due to several factors. Fortunately, a good friend called late last night to slap me upside the head with some common sense. At the time he called, I only had 450 words written and was struggling to reach the 500 word minimum quota. After he called, the writing caught fire and I finally stopped at 1200 words. This means I have officially surpassed the 20% completion mark!

"That's it?"

As I predicted, I spent most of the weekend working on my new entry to the screenplay competition, so I didn't write as much on the novel. I did, however, add a new 1083 words, which puts me over the 19% mark for completion of the first draft.

I tore my hair out for the first part of the weekend. Literally no concepts were coming to me for the screenplay prompt (genre: fantasy, subject: a natural disaster, character: an airport security guard). I eventually realized that the reason was that I was attacking it from a scenario and plot angle instead of letting the plot grow from a character. So I finally picked a concept and just started writing a character walking into the situation, focusing on who she was.

Thankfully, the writing flowed after that. I finished the first draft Saturday, polished it a little bit Sunday, and turned it in with hours to spare. Now I wait for a confirmation that the competition received my entry without any issues, and after that, I wait until July 18 to hear if I made the cut to the final round. I feel pretty good about my chances; I really like what I turned in.

Just write, damn it!

I slowed down a little yesterday, not deliberately but because the words seemed to come more slowly. I think I feel prey to a bad habit for writing a first draft: thinking too hard and too long about everything... word choices, characterization, etc. And while I felt good about what I'd written, I finished without that sense of elation that I've been experiencing at the end of the day up to now. I believe the reason for that is that I gave up so much momentum by stopping too often to think.

Still, I wrote another 1,038 words, bringing me to 18% of the first draft completed.

I've been doing a lot of reading of blogs by writers lately, looking for advice on how to build a "writer's platform," which is the latest terminology for writers doing their own marketing and promotion work. In doing this research, I came across a truly hilarious, and highly profane, website and blog--terribleminds.com by writer Chuck Wendig. If you are not easily offended by obscenities (I'm not), you should really check out his page on building a writer's platform, and pretty much anything else he posts to his blog. I laughed so hard reading this stuff that I was nearly in tears, and yet he consistently makes valid, practical points from which any writer will benefit.

But where I really found some advice that was very timely for me, in particular,

More progress and some good news

Okay, folks, I'm officially closing in on the first plot point, and at just about the right time (according to plotting experts), because after writing an additional 2,081 words yesterday, I now have my first draft 17% complete!

As part of my never-ending campaign to derail my own progress, I've been worrying a lot the last few days because the writing is coming so easily. Not that it doesn't take me a lot of hours to come up with each day's words--it does--but I'm not actually struggling, and it seems like I should be. After all, didn't Gene Fowler say, "Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead?"

Well, so far, I'm digging deep for what I'm writing and I like what I'm doing--a lot--but I'm nowhere near bleeding. And yes, I know this sounds stupid, so please feel free to make a doll with a lock of my hair and stick pins into it to your heart's content. That might at least provide me with something legitimate to complain about.

In other news, I just found out that I have advanced to the second of three

The good times keep on rolling

Had another really good day yesterday, wherein I actually wrote about 2,000 words, but did enough adjusting in the process that I actually had a net gain of 1,889 by the time all was said and done. So I am now a solid 15% done with the first draft!

But the exciting thing is that what I did yesterday felt so good. While the genre of this novel is contemporary fantasy, it is also comedic, and the scene I was working on yesterday was especially heavy on the comedy. Writing it was an absolute blast! When I finished, I texted a friend to say "I hope this scene is as funny as I think it is." She later read it and declared that it was, indeed, funny, so I have more or less independent confirmation.

I can only hope that this trend of feeling good about the writing will continue, although it's a double-edged sword; whenever I feel so wholeheartedly enthusiastic, I begin to wonder if I'm losing perspective, which leads to suspicion that the writing isn't as good as I think it is, which then triggers a certainty that it's not, and so on and so forth. You'd think there'd be a good medication for this, wouldn't you?

My cup of inspiration runneth over

After doing a bit of rewriting and tightening of the 11% of my first draft that I had completed by Friday, I found myself in a strange position: I was overly inspired. I know that sounds a little ridiculous, but I honestly felt so good about what I'd written and so full of creative energy that I was momentarily not sure where to go with it all.

At least one character that I'd intended to use and discard turned out to be too interesting and full of possibilities to toss out after a single use. On top of that, I suddenly had a number of ideas for the the climactic scenes of the story that were much more interesting and full of delicious conflict than I had previously imagined.

So, I took the weekend off from writing while I pondered all this. And I'm still not sure exactly what my outline will look like going forward, but yesterday, I did manage to get most of the way through my next scene and produced a tidy sum of 2,258 words, bringing my draft up to 13% completion!

Never mind!

Yesterday was a very atypical day for me, novel-wise. I didn't actually write more from where I left off the day before. Instead, I went back and read everything I had written in order to clean it up, weaved in the stuff I had just sort of air-dropped into the plot along the way, and tackled known problems that I had left myself notes about. I wound up writing probably an additional 800 words or more, but because I also cut a bunch of stuff as I went, I only ended up with a net gain of 179. But hey, I still have 11% done!

I know I had kind of committed myself to just writing straight through to the end of the first draft, but I think I'm not temperamentally capable of that. I used to go back and rewrite everything I'd done before each day before continuing on the story, which resulted in a really great first couple of pages which then progressively deteriorated. I'm not doing that this time. But I do think I need to do a quality-control rewrite every 10,000 words or so, just to ensure that the tone and the logic and plotting remain consistent throughout.

What really shocked me as I reread my first few scenes was this: they weren't in need of that much rewriting. I did completely strike one paragraph and I rewrote the first three paragraphs of the novel, but after that, it was just a lot of smaller tweaks. I had really expected to have to do more rebuild, when in fact what was needed was mostly finishing work.

And today my friend and writing partner (on yet another novel project) read the whole thing and declared that it is, in fact, not even close to crap. So, yay! I can stop driving myself batshit crazy and get back to work. Several other people have offered to read my draft, so I have to add some more to it in order to make it worth their time. :D

And by the way, I feel I should apologize to anyone who actually follows this blog for the fact that it reads like it should be titled "Leanne: Portrait of a Middle-Aged Neurotic." But hey, they do say to write what you know.

This is a stupid concept that nobody wants to read

As I predicted in yesterday's post, the pace of my writing did indeed slow down yesterday as a result of my having to stop and rework the next portion of my outline. This was necessary because, after actually writing the stuff dictated by my outline so far, the next scenes I had prescribed initially either weren't quite appropriate or just not as good as the ideas I had now.

Still, I managed to do 700 words yesterday, so that's nice!

Interestingly, my subconscious saboteur decided to make another derailment attempt. Last night, I started wondering if maybe my protagonist was the only character I would ever be able to write successfully. (This was brought about by the fact that this is far and away my most successful novel attempt.) I promptly rattled off several other characters I've written successfully (in a separate novel I'm co-authoring), so I beat that attempt at sabotage rather easily.

This morning, however, I was taking a shower and suddenly had the thought pop into my head that my novel plot was stupid. Just silly and stupid and utterly uninteresting to anyone but me. This bit of negativity has been harder to refute, simply because, besides me, nobody has read what I've written yet. I really don't know for sure that my plotline isn't dumb, I have no way of knowing if anyone who doesn't see my face in the mirror every day will find this story compelling. For all I know, people will cringe as they read it and won't progress beyond the first ten pages.

Don't touch that fire extinguisher

My hot streak has continued.Yesterday, I wrote another 1,955 words! This brings my running total above the 10,000-word mark by a healthy margin:

Things will probably slow down a little today, because I need to rework the next part of the outline. The way I've written the last couple of scenes dictates that the outline I have for the next two or three needs to be tweaked quite a bit. So I suppose that most of today's work time will be spent reshaping the next scene or two, with enough left over to write my minimum of 500 words. Unless my fire is still burning after all the outline work and I can zip through an extra 500 or so.

That's actually a real possibility, since I've reached the point where I'm actually "living" in this novel world of mine now. That's when my creativity hits overdrive and I just don't want to stop writing until it feels like the right time to quit. Although I love being inside the head of my protagonist so much, I never really feel like stopping. I just have to sometimes, to eat and sleep and stuff.

Anyway, I'm off to rework the outline. Wish me luck!