Breaking it down.

I am definitely ready for a holiday. A real one too – the kind with more than a week off and no cel phone or computer access. Work is driving me batty, the house is an untidy mess, and all I can think about is getting food and gear organized for our hiking trip that starts in ten days. Between now and then is another few days of work, travel to Victoria, family visiting and my brother’s wedding. Lots going on including all the drama that attends such things, but at least I’ll be off work from next Wednesday and not returning to the office for eleven whole days. Wow.

Okay, so it’s not a huge break, but at least a few days without the natter of this office going on around me, not to mention an overwhelming workload. Thank-pete for headphones, I can tune out enough between now and next Wednesday afternoon to get through it.

I’m now on the third day in a row of being back at writing in the mornings and had a realization over breakfast that if I just added 600 words per day to this book project, by the end of 52 weeks I would have the rough draft of a novel. Which was heartening because writing has been feeling slow lately. I manage at least 500 words in my forty-five minutes per day, sometimes as much as 1000 (but not often) which I guess isn’t bad but have been feeling like at that rate I’ll never finish anything. After doing the math I guess I was wrong and if I persist I’ll have something to edit into a second draft in a year’s time.

I’m not sure if my process for writing these days is “right” and I’m a bit torn about trying to write in a linear fashion (start to finish) or experimenting with individual scenes. I decided to start with a few individual scenes for the sake of practicing both my character’s voice (I’m writing in first person which I find difficult but much more involved story-wise), and to see if there really is enough material for the story to be novel-worthy. I’m in the middle of the second of these practice scenes at the moment and I’m not disappointed that I started out this way. At the very least it allows me to break aspects of the story and my character down into manageable chunks without having to worry about 150,000 words all at once.

So that’s been the right place to start but I’m starting to think that after about three of these scenes I’m going to want to start at the beginning and work my way forward. We’ll see. Or this could become yet one more idea for a book that goes nowhere. I’m not really sure yet, but at least I’m writing and I’m interested in the characters I’m writing about (or “as”). I do recognize there is no single way to do this sort of thing, but I would like to figure out the right way for me to proceed so as to ensure that I actually maybe get a whole first draft written as opposed to abandoning it part-way through.

Which is why doing the math on how many words per day times 5 days per week times 52 weeks in a year made me feel a bit better about things. When you’re only at 5000 words, 145,000 more words seems a long way off. But broken out bit by bit, scene by scene, it starts to look more possible. I mean, people do this all the time judging from the number of books that make it into print, surely I can do this too?