writing, word count, and sandwiches

Guess what? The silence here really does mean that I’ve been writing. Granted, most of that writing took place yesterday in a concentrated 10-hour flurry, but nevertheless…there was a certain amount of thinking and trying and failing and time-wasting that led up to yesterday’s marathon that definitely has to be counted as part of the process. As for whether or not the new story is any good, I’ll leave that to my writers’ group to decide. Even if it is only sort of good, I can make it better. It just feels good to do the work I need to be doing. 

My word count in this current project is now up around 65,000, even though many of those are rough and unpolished. I know that obsessing about word count can cut both ways (writing to a target might produce too much filler, or useless dialogue or exposition or otherwise rambling prose), but I find it a really useful way to move forward. And let’s face it: books are built out of words. 

               Here is the lunch that my husband brought me yesterday to keep me going!

cutting

I've been working steadily away at my novel with a daily word count I record scrupulously (okay, obsessively) in a spreadsheet that I find endlessly encouraging as I watch the totals creep up. When I passed the 280-page mark a few days ago I was positively triumphant. After all, 280 is so very close to 300, and 300 is the number I've been carrying around in my head as the one to aim for. 300 pages is a novel, no doubt about it.

Of course, 300 pages or 100,000 words does not automatically give you a novel. I know that. But I had the idea that once I had a sizeable draft and had more or less wrapped up the story, I could go back and tweak things and put things in the right order and edit to my liking and I would have a draft that could at least be worked on and possibly even read by other people.

And so, over the past week, seeing how close I was getting to this magical number, I started readying the manuscript by putting sections in order, so that I could more easily see what was missing and what still needed to be put in. And --- long story short (I know, too late!) --- I realized I have to cut 52 pages.

These 52 pages belong to a secondary narration I'd added in at a late stage, hoping to prevent reader exhaustion with my protagonist, who narrates in present tense. But I see now all his narration was doing was staving off my own exhaustion at the time, as I tried to keep up my word quota in spite of feeling, at that time, a bit directionless. Reading over these 52 pages, I think I only really nail his voice in a few sections, perhaps 5 or 6 pages total. And the whole sideline I got caught up in with his character is both highly improbable and impossible to resolve. So.

It's time to cut.

Given how many problems this will solve, I should be happy. But it's impossible to not feel a little gloomy about all those wasted pages.

creeping up

I'm in one of those states where reading over the last post -- about how to get published -- seems like a funny taunt from a past self. Why, it's as easy as one-two-three! Oh, it is to laugh.

Not that I'm despairing or blocked or any of those things. I'm writing, and it's slow but steady. I'm doing that thing I do where I'm looking at my fantasy self-appointed deadline and my current word count and doing some calculations of just how much I'd have to write at a minimum just to meet it. The current magic number is 410 -- significantly higher than the oft-attempted-not-always-met-goal of a daily 250.



Of course, all this clinging to numbers is just a way to stave off other kinds of panic (is this any good? what's going to happen next?), but there is something satisfying, after all, at seeing a word count slowly, ever so slowly creep upward. Even if every so often your inner editor kicks in (or, say, kicks into higher gear, because is she ever not there, keeping things to a tortoise-pace?) and you have to delete a chunk and you find yourself slowly sliding down again.