Writing Progress

My current work-in-progress is taking me a bit longer to finish than I expected. In my defence, I had no idea what to expect. I set targets for myself partly to give myself clearer reference points to judge how long it would take. I knew going in that there was a good chance I wouldn’t hit them, but at least I’d know. I’d really like to get this book done, but I also can’t say that I am disappointed with how I am doing.

So what’s the score?

In mid-June (I was surprised it was that long ago, which proves my previous point) I put aside my other writing projects to focus on this novel. It had started life as a short story, but I had already decided to expand it into a novel and written a new beginning. So I had about 16,000 words and an outline. I wanted to add 70,000 words in seven weeks. I chose that target because I wanted to submit it to a specific small press who had a short submissions window open. I knew it was an ambitious goal, and it wouldn’t leave me much time to polish the story, but I thought I’d shoot my shot.

I got a strong start and made good progress in spite of a number of life interruptions, but eventually, my pace slowed down. The closer I got to the end, the slower it went. The story had developed in a slightly different direction than I planned, and I needed more time to think about how to pull it all together. My outline was very structured, and it was getting harder to line up all of the parts exactly as I’d planned.

By early August I had added over 57,000 words and was well over 73,000 total, but I hadn’t quite hit my target. I still had a bit of time before the submission window closed, but even if I finished the zero draft, it wouldn’t be ready to submit.

Up until then, I had not revised any of it. The story and characters developed as I wrote, so I made notes of where I would need to go back and change earlier scenes to match with later ones, but I hadn’t made those changes. I hadn’t even changed the original short story, just divided it into three chapters and stuck it where it fit into the novel.

Writing the end was going more and more slowly, and I was spending more time trying to fit together the puzzle pieces of the story than writing words. I needed to let it sit in the back of my mind and develop a bit more.

I decided to start revising.

Here’s the thing. Revising can be a trap, and it’s a trap I love to fall into. In the past, I’ve sometimes started revising too soon, and then just kept revising and revising and never finished writing. This time I made a conscious choice to not do that, so I was really hesitant to start now. But my novel was almost done, and longer already than anything else I’d written, and I knew what a lot of the revisions would be.

I also found a new target, a novel contest closing at the end of October. I’d have to move forward in order to meet it.

I started a new document and added a scene or chapter at a time as I revised them. A few times I had to go back a step or rearrange scenes but mostly I kept moving forward. A few things happened.

I got to read my story with some distance. My writing is getting better, but even the zero-draft was a good story. That felt good.

My story got longer and deeper, in spite of also getting more focused. I had been expecting to cut more words than I added, but it wasn’t the case.

I broke my very rigid planning structure and realized that was okay. The expanded story didn’t quite fit the framework anymore, so I needed to let go of the framework. That helped me realize that part of why I was struggling with the ending was that I was trying to force it to fit the structure, so I could let that go too.

I’ll write more about my planning structure later. I 100% believe that it is what let me get as far as I did before it became an obstacle. I will use it again for my next novel, and I suspect I will recognize earlier when I need to discard it. There’s a corollary in swordplay - when your weapon stops being useful or becomes a hindrance, drop it and move on. That doesn’t mean you want to enter the fight without a weapon.

So where am I at now?

I did not make my second target. Several people have told me that editing takes longer than writing. I suspect it’s not always true, but it is for me with this book. I’ve been moving forward, not just rewriting the same scene over and over. My new target is that when this book is done, I will look for a market, and until then, I don’t need to worry about it.

My revised draft has over 70,000 words in it, and there are 23,000 words of zero draft still untouched for a total of 93,000 words. If the remainder expands proportionally, I’ll finish at a little over 100,000. Based on that information, I should be done in early to mid-December, but that’s a guess, not a goal.

And what matters the most is that I love this book, and I still love working on it!