Good news today! My main New Year's Resolution this year was to complete four novels. I didn't have to start them from scratch, just write THE END and mean it on four separate documents.
Today, I finally met my halfway point, and I think I'm figuring this all out. I finished the first draft of my second novel of the year today, and I only started writing it in July. All told, it probably took six weeks. And I definitely didn't write every day. The book is super, super rough--but now it is a complete story, and to finish it I will just have to flesh out a bunch of sections. I'm so excited.
That leaves two more novels to complete this year. I have several novels out there that are over halfway done, so I might just pick one or two of those and round them out.
The point of this was to just practice completing things. In my life, I've probably hit that 10,000-hour mark of deep practice with sheer writing--but NOT, unfortunately, with completing story arcs. Which is a whole other thing entirely. So I get to work on that this year.
Happily, I think I'm figuring it out. So excited to start the second draft! I'm hoping to produce the final draft by the end of September. And then I'll have three months to finish two more novels... well, we'll deal with that when we get there, I guess.
Good gravy, you're prolific! And you hope to have the final draft in a few weeks? I have this novel I've been fighting with for about a year now, and it's nowhere near complete. I managed to get to "the end" around New Years, but I've spent all of 2012 just trying to iron it into something coherent. Meanwhile I've got this other novel idea that I actually like much better, but I don't want to start on it until I finish this one because I'm starting to get the sneaking suspicion that I might not be a novelist :)
ReplyDeleteCongratulations, though. Keeping to self-imposed deadlines is hard work!
You know, I discovered something that led to prolific-ness. Prolificity, if you will. What happened was, I was struggling with a 120,000-word tome that I'd rewritten something like 5 times over 3 years--or 4?--and decided to shelve it. I was not convinced that I would ever make it work. Or make anything work. But I had this spark of an idea, so I decided back in March to just give it a whirl.
ReplyDeleteSo I did, and the first draft was completed in six weeks. And then I did some more drafts and submitted to Istoria Books and am still waiting to hear back on that.
But what I realized with that book was that it's actually good advice to just keep writing. When a sentence wasn't PERFECT, I just left it and kept going, until I had a complete draft. It wasn't anything special, just a bunch of sub-par sentences linking together a story. But when you read that story, it was just that... a story, with a beginning and middle and end. And then I could just go through and take each weird sentence and flesh it out into a paragraph. So when I finished my first draft, it was 28,000 words long, and then I ended up fleshing it out to be 58,000 words.
This draft I just finished is 31,000 words, but I anticipate being able to flesh it out similarly. This will probably be a 60K-word novel in the end.
Anyway, it was a new technique for me and it's been really helpful. Eventually I'll get back to my 120K-word tome, but in the meantime, this has made writing a lot more fun!
Good for you! I think that's an awesome goal. And lucky for you you still have NaNoWriMo this year, so I'm sure you could make your goal by the end of December :D I should go back and actually look at some of my New Year's Goals and see if I'm working on any of them. Which means I'm probably not :D haha...good luck. Keep writing!
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