Weekly Word Counts
Novel draft: N/A
Short prose: (too lazy to add it up…next week?)
Poetry: N/A
Editing hours: A few?
No post last week due to…new bookshelves! Hooray for new book storage!
Progress is happening, slowly but surely…not that you’d know it by my word counts, eh? Part of my progress for the past couple of weeks has been integrating planning/plotting into my writing process, which is something I haven’t really worried about before. I’ve generally been a “pantser” – writing without an outline, plan, or much of an idea at all about where the story is going. But I’m trying something new, and kind of liking the results so far.
I’m making very vague, general outlines even for my current drafts (WIPs = works-in-progress). These are nothing like the outlines we all learned to make in school, with letters and numbers and bullet points all in neat tabbed sections. These are hand-written or typed (both, in some cases) paragraphs describing in very general terms who is doing what, and where…and often notes pertaining to motivation and theme as well.
The more complicated the plot, the more notes. Short stories wherein the entire point is for the characters to get laid and have fun doing it (did you forget I occasionally write erotica too?) get a couple paragraphs each, while a story with a bit more substance might get a full page.
A complex story with multiple interwoven plots (like the one I plan to write next month) warrants several pages of notes.
Whenever I tried this before, I always lost interest in actually writing the story after planning it, because I already knew what was going to happen. This time seems to be different…it *feels* different. Perhaps because I have more discipline for the actual work of writing now than I did before. Or maybe because I know that I still don’t really “know” what will happen until I actually write it. Stories change course quite often based on the characters and their actions, and I’m far more aware of that and used to it happening now. So I expect it will happen even with my “outlines”, and am not so sure I know exactly how things will happen. Which keeps me interested in writing the story, thank goodness.
In any case, I’ve been doing line-edits by hand, which is far more productive than working on-screen for me, and I’ve also been carving out a few more short stints of time in which to write/edit/plan outside of my normal late-night time. I’m still getting more sleep, and still using the Neo for the bulk of my drafting. I’m actually planning to buy a spare Neo to keep around, just because it’s proven so handy in writing without the distractions that are just…right there on my laptop. And it’s also so much easier on my eyes. I can’t tell you how invaluable that really is.
So, good, measurable progress. Next week, I want to be writing at least 14k per day, and then NaNo starts the week after.
Yikes!