I got in 700 words tonight, and that puts my novel right around 52,000 words. But the thing is that I don’t even know if it’s half finished–in fact, I get the feeling that it isn’t. I know that Andy said that this isn’t something I should worry about in the first draft, but I’m not so sure. How long is a typical novel? At this rate, the final one could be somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000. Am I going to spend most of my rewriting time just cutting stuff out? I don’t know. I guess I’m just a really wordy guy; I sometimes have this problem when I’m talking with people in person as well.
Also, I’m finding that it really does become more difficult when you get towards the middle of a big story. It’s a lot easier to look at what you’re doing and doubt that any of it is any good. I think this is partially because you think out a story a lot faster than you can actually write it. I’ve had most of this story figured out before I even sat down to write it, and even though a lot of it has changed since I started, in my mind I’m still a good twenty pages ahead of myself. When it takes a long time to write things out to the point where you’re at in your mind, you first get a little bit bored, then you start wondering why it’s taking so long to get to the good part, and then you look at what you’ve written and you think “wow, this stuff is so boring compared to what’s going on in my mind. Is it really any good?”
The solution is probably a combination between focusing on the part where you’re at and learning how to write faster. The two are probably connected: when you know what you’re saying, it’s a lot easier to say it. When you’re focused on the story as you need to tell it (as opposed to the story as you’re imagining it for yourself), it is given more clearly what you need to say and you can say it faster and more clearly. But really, I have no clue how to get over these kinds of difficulties. And I think they’re going to get worse. This is going to be hard–not because of the craft itself so much as self-criticism. I can always learn to write better, but really believing in the story I’m telling, that’s the difficult part. And the most important part, I’m sure.
The other day, I was thinking about writing and my future, and I had this really crazy thought. However, it’s going to take up a whole post in itself to give the background of it, and it won’t really make a lot of sense without the background, so I’m going to have to write about it later. I’ve still got to sort it out.
Another thing that I plan on doing in the future (probably on Sundays, which I try really hard to set aside for things other than school) is read through my journals to the time when I was writing The Giver of Life, one of my first novel attempts, and the pain and self-doubt that I went through during that time in my life. I’m really interested to see and understand a little bit better what I went through during that time. I think that it did a lot to strengthen me as a writer, and help me in the end to gain more confidence and realize that most of my self-doubts were incorrect. However, as I’m getting deeper into this novel, I’m starting to wonder how immune I really am to the emotional roller coaster that goes along with this kind of a project. I don’t know. I’ll let you know what I find out.
