But overall, I'm happy with the amount of words I'm getting out. Twice I've felt I've reached a mental wall, and usually, I'd skip the scene and either start a more interesting one, recount a character's dream, or introduce a new character. This year, I've just finished the scene off quickly, and moved on to the next. There's one scene I haven't finished; but it's by no means essential to the story, and I may cut it out entirely in the rewrite.
I'm going against a lot of the advice I give out to my NNWM participants, this year. But having written five hasty, unreadable novels, this year I'd like to write a good-sized, readable first draft of a submittable manuscript.
My outline is helping me hugely — it's so good to have a written scene-by-scene playout. So far it hasn't at all impeded my creativity; it just keeps me focussed. I know where I want to go to next, and how many words it should take me to get there. The only exception has been when one scene took 800 instead of 300 words; so for my next scene, rather than taking up 400 words, I found it more effective to sum it up: "When we woke up the next morning, the house was still there. Our neighbours were gone."
Overall, my estimated scene lengths are conservative (which is good, I thought they were too generous); at this part of the story, I've written 4000 words more than I had projected.
So it's good. It's all good. But now I need to stop congratulating myself on my current 18% — and get to writing twelve thousand words in one day.
Total words today: 12,026. WOOHOOO!!
Total words overall: 30,200. Passed the quarter-mile mark!
I rock so hard! Man, that was good. My story is awesome. I'm awesome. The world is awesome!
I also do not want to have to do another 12,000-word day. Ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment