Getting into gear

I was following a thread on a Facebook page for authors the other day and the discussion was about daily word count. Several people aim for a number of words each day - 1000 seems a popular number. Others don't count words at all but aim to write for an hour. One day this might produce a paragraph, other days a chapter.  When they've done their allocated word count, or time, they might carry on to exceed it, or do something else, but it's a measurable, organised way of ensuring that forward progress is made regularly.

I like organised. I like forward progress as well.

What's my method? What do I do?

Hmm.

I need to do some thinking about this, especially as I have such limited time to write. I have two days a week that I try to protect for writing, and that's just the hours between school runs, say, 9.30am until 2.30pm.  Some days I find that I can get down to things straight away and manage a blog post, a couple of scenes from the book, and still have time to surf Facebook and check out the headlines. These days are rare.

More common are the days where I start with the surfing (bad idea), try to appease the irritable Blog Monster and then find that I can't get my story into my head at all. I am distracted, and distracted by the most ridiculous things, like the need to clean windows, or check whether I should put out the black bin or the green one for the bin-men in the morning. I make endless cups of coffee before deciding that there is insufficient time left for actually...ahem...writing. Too late.

Then I sit in the car waiting outside school berating myself for wasting such wonderful empty hours with trivia when I want to get this thing written.

I'm told this is not uncommon, but I need to get over it. It's not going to write itself, and I am determined that I'm not going to give up on it. I need to be more disciplined. Maybe the 1000 words a day would do. One thousand words each day and I'd have a 90,000 word first draft in three months.

May, June, July. In time for the summer holiday, I'd have a draft to begin working on.

Except that there's no way of writing every day. There simply isn't time, or peace. I so envy those people with lots of space and time to spend on their work in progress, but at this point in my life I have school runs and a husband who is only home at weekends and more than enough swimming practices to deliver my children to every weekday evening and Saturday and Sunday too.

One thousand words twice a week when I do have the opportunity, and it'll take the best part of a year.

What I do know is that when I get in the right frame of mind, in the zone, I can write 3,000 words in a couple of hours. So I have hope.

Well, it's like this. I'm revving in neutral. I'm not getting anywhere. Time to get into gear.

Cogs and levers

It's been a bad week.

I've been busy, things have happened that have knocked my duck off, as they say here in Derbyshire, but the main thing regarding my Work In Progress is that it's suddenly become overwhelming. Too big, too ambitious, too complicated, too many words. So I've backed off.

I'm waiting for some feedback from someone who's casting an experienced eye over what there is to date, and suddenly it becomes more important that I wait and see what she says before I go any further. It might be that the whole thing is a non-starter. With the new realisation that I have to address some fairly heavy issues rather than introduce an idea but then not take it anywhere I find I'm stuck. I've lost confidence, not in the story, but in my ability to tell it.

I'm stuck. It's not a writer's block kind of thing, because I'm not sitting at the keyboard waiting for words to come; it's just that the thinking has become too difficult. I find myself not even wanting to sit at the keyboard.

Do successful novelists have times like this?

It's as if this story is an elaborate structure of cogs and levers and all was going well; it was starting to whirr into life, and then I realised that I have to insert another big cog. As a result, the whole piece needs re-engineering and work has ground to a halt. The cogs and levers lie all around me, waiting to be incorporated into the new machine. It'll work better, smoother, and it'll be more satisfying, but... it's just not built yet.

The engineer is tired and confused and not feeling up to the task.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, I hope. In the meantime, let's put the kettle on.

Custard cream, anyone?




Image credit: ashton_cogs1.JPG by doctor bob. Courtesy of Morguefile.com. Used with permission.