Last week, I couldn’t manage more than 2000 words of my 5000 word target. Paradoxically, this week I hit my 10,000 word target relatively easily. I have just over 140,000 words now.
I made two changes: firstly, I did my fiction word target first, before all the other to-do list items each day. This can feel risky, because it means putting off the paying, other-people’s-deadlines stuff, but it’s like the simple financial advice to pay yourself first (in terms of saving or investment plans) so you’ll motivate yourself to come up with the money to pay others’ bills ‘somehow’: I did my fiction first, and came up with the time to do the technical writing ‘somehow’ ie I had less time to procrastinate so I procrastinated less.
Secondly, I got up slightly earlier. This was not a big change in itself, only half an hour or so, but it made a big difference on days when I had appointments/errands. The extra time allowed me to change my schedule so that little patches of 15 or 30 or 45 minutes between appointments were consolidated into patches of an hour or more. I may have mentioned before that I can write if I have an hour or more, but have a lot of trouble when I have less than an hour. Getting up earlier and rearranging my timings solved that (just getting over this mental block would also solve it, of course).
I have officially declared my first draft done. Though the Lily POV is in terrible shape and about a fifth as long as the Simon POV, I don’t think I’m going to get any further by forcing myself to keep going on with it: all her necessary scenes are there in note form, but they are stalled because of changes needed to both POVs in the early part of the novel. If the foundation for Lily’s character and motivation has gone wrong early, it’s hard to fight through to construct decent later scenes.
Therefore, it’s time to shift to second-draft mode. For the first time ever, I’m going into a second draft already having a novel-length story. I don’t have to brainstorm for extra scenes, I just have to play within the scenes themselves (and even, gasp!, get to delete some if they don’t help the story: I’m eyeing off the last 30 pages or so for this treatment).
I am no longer working to a word target – word targets can be a hindrance at this stage, because psychologically, it’s quite hard to delete 5000 words at the same time you’re supposed to be adding another 1000 words to the word count (see, it means you have to write 6000 words).
I am still planning to try for 1000 words a day, perhaps on short stories, but I have an awful backlog of editing to do. I have this current novel to edit, plus the one I wrote last year, plus a good handful of short stories. Therefore, the writing stage might need to go on pause for a time.
