Oh, how I’ve wanted to write this for so, sooo long about this (second) first draft of my second novel: words complete!
I finished the story today. It’s not “the end,” since it’s the second book in the trilogy (and third, but more on that in a second)…but THIS adventure, this phase of it, has now been written.
EXCEPT…for that 1) this draft is just shy of 600 pages, so I’m going to try and split it into two books, which I genuinely think will work quite nicely, and 2)…
The first of the two split books basically needs a second and third act rewrite. For the uninitiated, that’s 75% of the book. About 60,000 words. A solid month’s worth of writing, and that would be doubling my existing best month’s output.
I can do it
I will do it.
And I will have TWO books to release by year end instead of just the one. Whew.
To get good at anything, you have to put in the time and the practice of actually DOING that thing. Not just thinking about it, but doing it. It took me so much hard work to get here today, writing the last scene of a book I started just over a year ago. A year.
A YEAR.
It’s frustrating to focus on how long something took me, so instead I’ll focus on where I am now…which is that I can sit down and crank out 4,000 words in a day. I know I can do that. I can reliably produce around 10,000 words in a week, and my next goal is to bump that up to about 15,000 a week, which actually feels very, very doable.
AND…I’ve been through the rewriting process now once, and I’ll do it another two times this year, at least. But just having done it once, I know how much work it is, how much time it takes.
That knowledge, on the one hand, can be very overwhelming on my bad days, because I know just how much work it is…but on the other hand, it can be very empowering because of exactly what I said earlier: I can only get better and faster at something by doing it. This second time around won’t be as fast as I want it to be…but it will be faster than the first time. And I am looking forward to that.
It was also very affirming today to finish this book and realize that I *do* have a solid story in there. Things are happening that matter, that change my characters, and are meaningful to them. For me, THAT’S where the excitement and the action always comes from: what does it mean to the characters. I’m not sure if that’s the same for everyone, but that’s what it is for me…and I do have that. Thank god. There were times I was writing this book, guys, where I seriously doubted that.
There’s nothing like an ending to reveal to you what your beginning and middle need to cover.
My ending did that today for me.
Tomorrow, though, I’m resting. Friday too, I think, but we’ll see. Then I’m back to the daily grind halfway on Saturday and Sunday, and then back at it big full-time on Monday next week. Maybe I’ll shoot for 20,000 words a week and try to get this next draft done by the end of July. Holy shit, that would be awesome.
We’ll see. It depends on how easily the story comes.
Man…that’s another thing I’ve realized: not all stories will come in the same manner, or with the same level of difficulty. Some will just pour out. Others will fight me. But, at the end of the day, all that matters is this:
Trust the process.
The process of brainstorming, drafting, rewriting, and editing will take any story and, when all those steps are done with due care, produce something worth reading. It really will. So, when I’m stuck at any one of those steps, I just need to remember that I can let it suck right then and there and move on–do my best to fix it, and move on–because the process will fix it.
Trust the process.
Good night!