This week it was all about The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
I did write every day this week (so far, and I’m planning on getting some words down on Saturday) and that’s good, but it’s not THE good that I’m referring to. Let me walk you through it in reverse order.
The Ugly
At the beginning of the week, I realized that this new book was starting to feel like work. Not that writing isn’t hard work, but the feeling that I got was more like something that I felt I ~had~ to do rather than something I ~wanted~ to do.
For those of you that don’t know, this isn’t a good sign. And that leads me to…
The Bad
The reason why I was having problems was that just about everything in my story was more interesting than my main character. Seriously, the alley she gets held up in was more interesting.
The reason for this was that she had no problems. She was ~going~ to have problems. They’re out there waiting to pounce but, right now, she’s got no problems and she’s surrounded by people that have some pretty big problems.
I’m not a “Fix it in Post” kind of guy, and this push to get words down for the sake of getting words down and fixing stuff later was really getting in the way.
The Good
I gave up on trying to reach a specific number of words this month. I went back to page one, word one, and I fixed the problem. I sat back and thought about the worst thing that could happen to this character and I slapped that threat down on the table in the first pages. This, naturally, had a ripple effect and I’m going through the rest of what I’ve got down and making changes.
So why is this a good thing?
Two reasons:
- I know more about myself as a writer, now, than I did at the beginning of the month.
- The book doesn’t feel like work anymore. It’s still hard, but it’s a good kind of work.
Yeah, it’ll take a minor miracle for me to hit 50,ooo words by the end of November, but I still call it a win.
Happy Friday!