Progress Report 2

The astute reader may notice that it has been over three months since my last progress report. I’m sure you’re thinking that in that time I must have a first draft complete and publishers knocking down my door to publish it. I bloody wish.

But I have made progress. Much of the last three months has been spent doing a lot of seemingly nothing on the project. The reality is that I needed to get some ideas and thoughts straight in my head before continuing with any writing. That took a lot of time, and that could probably be reduced by actually writing stuff, but I try not to think about that too much.

I continue to discover parts of my process, and sticking to the original mechanism I outlined in my last post about writing scenes instead of chapters, and moving to new scenes the moment the idea is resolved or it gets less exciting. That’s working wonderfully. The obvious downside is that some of the scenes I’ve written will not end up in the finished product, but I think this is a natural and expected part of my process. I’ve also discovered that I need to understand my characters better before writing the scenes for them. Their motivations especially need to be worked out ahead of time before I can write them properly. As I write this it sounds like obvious stuff, but I expected to learn these things as I went along through discovery, but that doesn’t seem to work for me.

Over the last three days I’ve had some time off from work and my plan was to spend it writing the way I’d like to write, should this ever become a full-time gig. I’ve got to say it has been excellent. In three days I’ve written about 6000 words (more or less 18 pages), 2000 each day. The words came easily, often pouring from my fingertips far faster than I expected them to. The jury is out of course as to whether they are the right words, but I’ll try not to think about that until the draft is done.

I’m sitting currently at around 30000 words total, and of those I consider about 20000 part of the ‘manuscript’. This accounts for the scenes I’ve dropped¹ and makes the final manuscript length about 100 pages. Not bad. Not great, mind you, especially after three months, but not bad at all. The whole process is extremely challenging, not least because a tremendous amount of self-doubt creeps into each and every word. It destroys creativity and sometimes makes me want to purge my hard drive² of the mess that I’ve written myself into. But I am getting better at turning off that part of my brain, at least when I’m writing. It’s the inbetweeny bits that get to me.

I’ve said it before, but I think it bears repeating – consistency is key. If, instead of thinking about the story and writing notes and doing pretty much anything except write, I aimed for 1000 words per day over the last three months I’d have a manuscript of around 90000 words³. That’s a novel. That’s a damn novel in three months. Over these past few days I’ve written a thousand words in a matter of a couple of hours, so I don’t think I have much of an excuse to continue like this. 2000 may be too much to juggle with a full-time job, but 1000 feels very doable.

Over the weekend I was in Waterstones, skimming through a few books on the craft of writing, and in the introduction of one⁴ was a quote that somewhat encouraged me: “A professional writer is an amateur who doesn’t quit.” - Richard Bach

So I’m not going to quit.