For some reason, I am always tempted to tell myself I’m doing things wrong. When things are hard or don’t flow well, my first answer is “what can I be doing better right now? This can’t be right.” But actually, it can be. The impulse to blame is strong inside of me, but some things are meant to be slow. It’s how the process works, and it’s not wrong.
This week has included a lot of lecturing my internal monologue to fix itself, because I should know better by now.
I’m starting the draft of a new book. It’s a book I actually wrote several chapters of several years ago when I had the idea. They’re not bad chapters, and I especially like the tone, however I’m not using them. Reason number one for that is that in my outlining, I’m taking it a slightly different place than I originally intended when I wrote them. Reason number two is I’m a significantly better writer than I was a few years ago (although honestly, the chapters are pretty good). Reason number three is in the past I once tried to use several chapters that I had written a long time ago and it turned out very badly as they were not very good chapters. That experience still makes me wince and I’m not doing that again. So I’m starting fresh, but I do have the other word doc open.
Usually when I start a book, I have about 30,000 words sitting inside of me waiting to be word-vomited onto the page in a very dramatic, very fast writing extravaganza. For whatever reason, that’s what’s in my brain at the start of a project. This week, however, I did not write 30,000 words. I wrote 4,000. Which is 26,000 words less than my usual dynamite start, and I was hard on myself about it. But writing less is not wrong at the start of a draft.
As a creative, it’s important to give yourself grace to begin the project as the project feels inside of you, not the way you want it to go. It’s great if those are the same, but sometimes they’re not, and that’s okay too. Every project is different. In this case, I am dusting off and reawakening a project I am very excited about and have a lot of enthusiasm to invest in it, but I am swimming into it a little slower than usual. It’s not the series I have been writing, so I don’t have that story momentum to work off of. I think I do have at least 30,000 words inside of me waiting to be written down for it, but I am also trying to be conscientious of my outline and where I want the story to go.
I want good words, helpful words, productive rambling and imagining and thinking, which means I’m not running. I’m walking my words onto these pages and doing a whole lot of thinking as I do. Also, this book is a YA fantasy mystery, so it will probably end around 80,000 words. If I blab 30,000 words onto the page, that’s over a third of the book. With that many words, I better have a clear and concise point and story. It’s more pressure than writing a 135,000 word book where 30k isn’t even a quarter.
So here I am at the end of the official week one of writing with 4,000 words. It’s a start, which is the only way to begin a draft. It is much better than no words. I could’ve had 15,000 if I used the previous chapters I had written, but they’re not quite the right story. I’m not cheating to up my word count. I’m doing it right, from scratch. Here we go on the second book I’m writing (so far) in 2025. How many will there be total? Who knows at this point. Depends how fast this one goes. Currently, writing through resistance, but hopefully the ease of a fully understood story comes soon. To be continued next week.
Current word count: 4,072 words.
Jules Conrad 