I've been writing a lot recently. Every day in fact. Unfortunately, you don't get to see any of it here. I'm working on my first novel (and I really hate the way that sounds. It's such a pretentious thing to say). This is my first serious attempt at putting together a novel, one that I'm not going to walk away from and unless I'm hit by lightening or a car, I'm going to finish. I've said I'm working on a novel in the past. I've done NaNoWriMo and even hit the 50k word mark but I was so unimpressed with many of those words that I doubt I'll do anything with that project. My other aborted attempts, well, we'll see.

That's not to say that NaNoWriMo isn't a good experience. There are people who come out of that month with a manuscript that's worth something. And while mine wasn't, it did teach me a lot about writing and what it takes to sit down and write everyday. Writing 50k words is really hard work. Turing out ~2k words a day sucks and when I did it, I'd find myself writing any old bullshit to get to that 2k mark. My characters would wax poetic for pages on stealing cars or playing cards or picking up girls or doing cocaine. In fact I got so sick of the story I was working on that I made the main character a wannabe writer and I had him write short stories that ended up as part of the manuscript. That's not to say that I would never do it again, just not this year.

For my current project it took me 3 weeks to write and revise the first 11k words. It took me the 8 days to write another 5k words or so. I tell people, when they ask, not to revise their work while they're working on it. Just write everything out and revise later. My dirty little secret is that I spend a lot of time revising my work while I'm in the middle of it. If I'm unhappy with a passage, especially a passage where I'm trying to say something important, I can't go on until I'm happy with it. That's not to say it won't be revised or completely rewritten when I go back to it with fresh eyes, but I have to be happy with it at that moment or it's all I can think about.

I also tell people that I never work from an outline or notes or anything like that. I just sit down and the story writes itself. Sometimes I don't know what the ending is going to be until I get there because sometimes my characters end up interacting in ways that I didn't really expect them to. I always felt a little superior to people who worked from notes and outlines because that felt too much like work. Me, I just write, everything works itself out.

Well, that's no longer true. This is the first time I've had to write from an outline. When I was writing short stories I was able to hold the whole story in my head. If I wanted to add something at the beginning that wasn't really setup earlier it was easy to just jump back a few pages and add a scene.

Now I can't hold the whole story in my head. I mix up the sequence of events and I forget who said what to who. I'll write something that I think is based on events earlier in the narrative and the realize it's based on something that I've been thinking about, not something I've actually written out. So I've started working from an outline. I'm sort of appalling to me that I can't hold all these characters and scenes in my head. Especially when I'm the one who created them but there it is. And for now it's working for me. So while all the advice in the world is great and you can learn a lot from other writers, a big part of this is figuring out what works for you. Oh, and not looking down on someone else's method because a year later, when you have to use it, you're going to feel like an asshole for silently judging them for so long.

So here I am ~16.8k words into my current project.

Posted by Ben Corman at 5:34 PM

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Posted by: LEon at May 19, 2008 11:35 AM

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