i couldn't really sleep last night, which made me expect today to be dreadful. quite the opposite, i'm rather punch drunk and giddy for the following reasons:
due to packing, i have tons of clean laundry right now.
steve comes home tonight!
the guy who wolf whistled me this morning definitely appeared to live inside of a building (ok giddy might be a bit much to say about this one, but it's a step up from getting accosted by homeless men).
and.....
i have successfully surpassed the 10,000 word milestone with my draft!
that one, for me, is really big. if you need a little perspective that's 39 word doc pages with 1" margins double spaced times new roman size 12.
of course, this also means i'm only about 1/5 of the way there, but it's pretty exciting when you have the opportunity to surprise yourself. given my track record of false starts i honestly expected to peter out somewhere around nine pages. i cannot express how glad i am that i decided to keep myself honest by posting my word count to this blog (thank you everyone who encouraged me to do this).
the thing i've learned about creativity so far is that, even though the work is more fun, it's still work. inspiration isn't all it's chalked up to be. creativity is a skill, but a creative project is a task and it requires the same mundane, frustrating, laborious crap that i see everyday in the workplace. realizing this, makes the task at hand seem a lot more manageable. if i can plug away at databasing building stats, i can definitely plug away at a novel.
"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated." - david foster wallace
"No kid can do whatever they want to do. It's a total lie, but they have the right to try to do whatever they want to do. That's their right, to aim to do whatever they want to do. And you know what? Life might kick you in the face, life might not let you do what you want to do, but [my grandparents] always taught me that, you know, 'Go for it! Yeah, you wanna do that? Go for it, son, you've gotta do it.'" - james mcavoy
happy giddy tuesday, folks!
word count: 11,329
Congrats on hitting that milestone. That's a lotta words. Sounds like the perfect time to celebrate with a glass of wine tonight!
ReplyDeleteThat's awesome!!
ReplyDeleteI wanted to ask you something about starting out on your book - did you just start writing one day or did you lay out a plot and characters etc. before starting? I always seem to get stuck because I haven't fully formulated my thoughts... but I'm more of a "think things up as I go a long" sort of person so starting out from a traditional "start" to "finish" would be really hard for me... if I was going to write a book that is...
Every book writing attempt I have made prior to this one has been "think it up as I go along." This draft is the first I've ever laid out in terms of series of events that happen from the beginning to the middle to the end. It has definitely made it way less threatening when I sit down to write. I don't think I would have the consistent productivity I've experienced, if I hadn't had the key conflicts plotted out ahead of time. I find it very easy to invent characters and situations, but I've personally found one of my less natural abilities is formulating a story arc. I'm pretty sure none of my previous attempts at writing a book have lasted past 12 pages between two or three writing sessions before getting forgotten. I have to say I'm really glad I gave a certain level of outlining a try.
DeleteThat said, you'll see nothing that looks like a book outline in my possession. I have a couple scribbled notes on pieces of paper which tend to be my "to-do" lists. They are short lists of 4 or 5 things that need to happen next for the story to get where I want it to go. Here's what one of them says:
"I broke a window becuase I wanted to see what would happen."
>Cathartic love scene with Craig.
- Rex & Sue's house
>Andrea makes a friend via dealing pot.
- friend fascinated by time travel?
- friend introduces andrea to robbie?
Robbie = young roughly 20
Boredom sets in...
Essentially it is stream of consciousness note-taking and this all happens as I go along writing. The to-do lists make it feel a lot more "made up as I went along" without leaving me totally floundering for where my story is going. Since I know the key points of conflict the rest is just filling in the blanks, which I don't really lay out much as you see. The most I outline a character is giving Robbie (the future lover) an age. I know there is going to be the affair conflict coming, but I need a way to get Robbie in the picture.
Hopefully this is a semi-helpful look at my process. I definitely encourage you to give a pre-plotted story arc a try, but I don't think you need to feel as uninspired as a dry outline would make me feel. Let me know if you give it a try! I'd love a novel-writing buddy!
Congrats on your writing,darling! :) Love your blog...Xo,
ReplyDelete