Writing Process

I've been involved with a writing challenge this month. So far, I've written over 34,000 words on a new novel since March 1st. Woo hoo!!

This novel will be women's fiction and will center around things that I'm most passionate about. If you know me very well, you may be able to guess what this book will be about. Any guesses?

What's been great about this challenge, besides writing so many words, is learning more about my writing process. I've been keeping track in an Excel spreadsheet of the date, time, and word count. I've learned that I have averaged about 1500 words an hour. I'm starting to slow down now because I'm almost to the end of the story, but I've kept up that pace pretty consistently. I'm more prolific in the afternoon, 12:00-2:00, than any other time of day.

I've also learned that I can write more when I've thought about the story prior to sitting down and working. If I have a general feel for what I want to write, the story practically writes itself. I did spend the month of February doing a lot of pre-writing and writing scenes on index cards, so that's helped me a lot. I'm a planner.

Currently, most of this draft is dialogue. I "hear" my stories much more than I see them. I tend to write my first drafts in dialogue. That's helpful to me in a few ways: I can make sure the dialogue is moving the story forward, I can (hopefully) avoid info dumps in the description/narrative, and I can get a real feel for my characters by what they say and how they say it.

I've learned a lot through this challenge and by the end of the month I hope to have a working rough draft. After all, I can fix a terrible first draft, but I can't fix a blank page.

What is your writing process?

Writing and Fencing

Yesterday my husband, two sons, and I spent the day working on our fences. When we moved to our property, we originally built fences for large animals (horses and cows). We've had a drought since then and it's left us with less feed so we decided to begin raising small animals. Since we have the world's largest population of hungry coyotes, when we decided to begin raising goats, we had to tear down and rebuild our fences in order to protect the goats from these determined (and very noisy) predators. (We also have a llama to protect the goats, but we didn't want to depend solely on the llama to discourage the coyotes).

As I was working on our fence, I thought about how it relates to writing. The first time we built our fences it was a wide open space-an empty canvas-and we could choose wherever we wanted to place the fence. We had to plan and make decisions about what our goals were and then place the fence according to those plans. We had to decide where to place gates and how to access all the fields. We had to decide what type of fence to build and how to place it around our house. It was a wild adventure and when we finished we had something that looked much different than when we began. It was like the first draft of a story. We had started with nothing, but ended with something pretty amazing.

After the fence was built for large animals and we determined it no longer served our needs for smaller animals, it became more like the next drafts of a story. We had to remove the parts that no longer served us and make some changes, but we left the "skeleton." We didn't completely destroy it. We used the bare bones to rebuild, but added something else--changing it to meet our needs. We also had to do some more planning and make sure the end result would meet our goals.

While I was taking down the barbed wire fence and then attempting to coil it up (not an easy task and never do it with anything but leather gloves), I thought about the difficult task of rebuilding it and how this was even more work because, though the fence posts were still there, I had the work of removing the old and replacing with the new, just like it is to revise and rewrite. I have to remove the parts of the story that don't work and replace those parts with something new that will make the story better.

I believe the task of writing the first draft is work, but it's also invigorating to see a story take shape and when you're done you can see the huge task you've accomplished because you started with nothing but ended with something pretty amazing.

With rewriting and revision, you have the bare bones, the heart of your story, but there is still much work to be done. It isn't so easy to see what you've accomplished when you're revising and it takes a lot of stamina and dedication to go through a story bit by bit and piece by piece, but when you're finished, you have something that's even more amazing (hopefully). Then you can sit back, enjoy the fruits of your labors for a moment until it's time to dive back in and write something else.