As should be obvious from the wordometer doohickey, I've reached the end of week one not only on but slightly ahead of schedule at a hair's breadth over 11'000 words. I'm trying to gain a little leeway so I can have a long weekend off in a couple of weeks, so actually that makes me dead on target.
How's it going? Well it turns out writing full time is kind of hard work. Who would have thought? As the week wore on, those 2000 words came less and less readily. It's a fair target when you know where you're going, but writing three or four scenes that you only have a vague handle on is far from easy. The last six hundred words or so, dredged up with excrutiating slowness on Saturday morning, were no fun whatsoever. The other thing I'm noticing is that I simply don't have time for my usual approach, which is to redraft what I just wrote before I start a new section. Without that, I'm never entirely sure if I'm just churning out rubbish or not. That, coupled with the fact that I'm dealing with plenty of unfamiliar subject matter and pretty much reinventing my style as I go, is making the whole process a little more stressful than I'd like.
Positives? There's a lot to be said for the freedom of having a whole day (and indeed, a whole week) of writing time on your hands. I can start sections safe in the knowledge that I can come back to them in a few hours, for example. Also, I don't think I could have written something like this around work. I've already got about twenty characters (quite a few of them viewpoint characters) and half a dozen plot threads on the go; if I was going to be picking up those threads in months rather than days I suspect the whole thing would unravel pretty quickly.
Anyway, early days yet. Let's see how week two goes...
No comments:
Post a Comment