Yeah, and it’s kind of annoying…
Saturday, I finished the chapter I had been working on last week and planned out the next one (hopefully, one of the last). I have four scenes planned, each from a different viewpoint character.
I started out with the goal of writing all four scenes on Sunday, and starting out the new week with a different chapter. Yeah, right. :rolleyes: Instead, I got about a thousand words into this one really important scene, and did fairly well, I think.
Today, the goal was to finish that scene and make some good headway on the second scene. Instead, once I sat down, I really struggled with the words, and made it 1,000 words deeper into that scene…but it’s not finished yet.
It’s not like the progress I made tonight was frivolous and ought to be cut. In fact, I think it’s fairly important–I’m usually weak on visual descriptions, so I focused on that here because the things the character sees are very important. It’s just…I expected to get past all of that and get on to the real meat of this scene–the dialogue that she has with this other really important character.
So, I walked my character through the city, had her notice all kinds of weird and different things, got her in the door of the house of this other character, sat her down, had the new character walk into the room…and stopped. It took me an hour to get that far, and my mind just said “enough.”
I think that one of the things that makes writing so difficult is that it takes so much effort to write your first few words of the day. Sometimes, after only 100 or 200 words, you find your groove and things just come out. Other times (like with me tonight), you write 1,000 words and you still haven’t broken through that barrier. It’s hard.
The really annoying thing is that I really want to finish this novel by the personal deadline I set. April 25th is approaching fast. It’s like the water flowing under, holding me down. The thing that really makes me anxious is that this novel is progressing a lot slower than I thought it would. A month ago, I was confident that I would finish this thing early, perhaps even in March. Now, I might end up holing myself up somewhere during the reading days to finish it in a 10,000 word sprint (yeah right–is that even creatively possible?).
Fortunately, I think I left enough of a cushion that I’ll be safe. I’m confident that this chapter will be finished by the end of the week, and there are maybe two chapters after this. If I get a head start on them, I might be able to handle it.
I think that the key is to write regular amounts on a steady basis, rather than writing when the story comes to you. I wasn’t feeling like sitting down and writing this evening, but as I mentally prepared myself to do so, I started coming up with all kinds of little ideas for things that I could put in the scene. A couple of those things really grew and are going to recur in different parts as well–and solved another problem I’ve been struggling with. Good stuff.
Well, I’d better finish blogging so I can do my homework, write a little more in this story, and go…to…bed…
