Ok, someone told me that I did put too much emphasis on the number of words I write and that the quality of what I write should be more important than the quantity.
Well, I suppose that’s partly right.
In my defense, the quality is probably not something I want to dwell too much on right now. I certainly have a long way to go here (let’s not kid ourselves) and right now, word-counts are the only way I have to estimate my advancement.
I’ll try to tune it down somewhat. You have the progress bar at the top of this page, so I don’t have to actually mention the number of words written every night, that’s redundant.
I’m not promising anything here : I don’t think I’ll be able to restrain myself once I pass some important number (100 comes to mind here), but I’ll not mention it every day.
What’s important is that I write every day (or do some writing-related activities, like outlining, research, …) and I don’t actually have to force myself to do that (Astonishing!)
On last night’s writing…
That was a difficult session : Ok, I didn’t spend as much on writing yesterday as I do other days, but the mood was not there. Mood is an important factor. I sometimes can force myself to write through, but some other days, I simply can’t.
As I said earlier, I write myself into the chapter and yesterday was the beginning of a new chapter. The last one was a climax (of sorts) and I have to take that story line and show what happens next. That’s tough. One of the things that kept me back last night was, to put it simply lack of outline about what I already wrote.
It turns out I needed some information about what a particular character had said before in two instances and my lean outline being way too skeletal didn’t mention it. I had to go back into the actual text and read back to find out if what I was writing was coherent or not. I had to do this twice and on the second occasion, I had to look if a character DIDN’T say something. Definitely more time consuming.
This is a case of discovery writing being stopped in it’s tracks because the outline is too thin. I’ll have to work on that – I already thought I was doing it (putting names, places and so on in the outline as soon as I had mentioned them in the text), but this obviously isn’t enough.
Thoughts about how the book is doing (the “I’m a terrible writer” part) :
Characters evolve in surprising ways (Discovery writer here!) : I like how Listeria and Ciera turn out; I don’t like what Lorn has become and Onmk… he’s in between that. He’s not the funny character he once was. Having given him a life on his own and a hidden agenda has completely changed that character. Now, he’s not funny anymore, but he’s more interesting. The question here is : is he interesting enough to interest the reader or not? Maybe I should be wary that I promised something to my reader at the beginning (the funny disney-like sidekick) and I’m not going to fulfill that promise as things are going.
Plot is looking good : I’m coming to a partial climax with the party scene. Should be interesting to write and will give me a great opening for the end of the act.
Setting : I’m putting more and more setting into the novel. Sure, I’m not done and I’m even wondering if I will have enough space to put everything I want to put down (hence the historical lesson of the last chapter). Setting is a big part of why I wanted to write that particular novel (the political/social structure) and I fear that I didn’t go far enough on that part.
Style : Generally speaking, not as bad as what I would have thought before starting to write. Now for specifics, I still have trouble with some parts, see below.
dialog : two people talking to one another are a strange thing to look at. Conversation has some strange patterns and I don’t think I got that part quite right. For instance, my dialog tend to be sequences of questions (short) and answers (long). A real conversation would never be like that.
punctuation : As I said before, where do I put the occasional coma, hyphen, semicolon? I think I evolved on this since the first pages, but inserting text between quotes is still difficult for me as in : “I’m going to go to lunch, ” she said, “maybe I’ll meet you at the restaurant”. That looks easy enough – use the pause in the phrase to get out of the quote, put the attribution (she said) and go on with the quote. Now, try to ask yourself how to do that if the first part is a question ending with the question mark. Then, the attribution has to start with a capital. Or not, I don’t know.
voice : I will have to ask around to people that will actually read this book, but I don’t think I’ve got voice (character voice) quite right. Maybe for Onmk or Listeria – I hear them clearly in my head, so I know them well, but the others? To me, they sound all the same for now.
Ok, I will stop here for now, this post is getting long enough.
