Some Mondays feel more like the working writer than others.\u00a0 This past weekend, I deliberately took both Saturday and Sunday off from the book.\u00a0 I hoped this would generate some pressure from the book to start of the week, and\u00a0 I had plenty of other things to do.<\/p>\n
2388 words came out today, not a torrent, but some good ideas that I hadn’t thought of until today.\u00a0 But it was not an easy day and required more effort than some days that yield more words.<\/p>\n
I definitely write more in a day if I’m keeping track day by day.\u00a0\u00a0 And if I keep count early on, I don’t fall as far behind my personal schedule (which is set up to allow space for the inevitable interruptions and still make the contractual deadline.) \u00a0 But are the words any good?\u00a0\u00a0 At this stage of a book,\u00a0 my guesstimate would be that 65-70% of them are good (in terms of all components–the plot part is good, the characterization is solid and not slipping, the sequence of sentences and paragraphs is close if not right, word choices, name choices, grammar, spelling, etc, etc, are all good as they are and won’t need more than a quick skim later.)\u00a0 Another 20% is approximate but not awful…will need quite a bit of work, but the bones are sound.\u00a0 And 10-15% is wrong in something major.\u00a0 It could be worse…some that I now think of as very rough might actually be no good at all.\u00a0 It’s never better.<\/p>\n
For some writers, it works to revise as they go, sentence by sentence.\u00a0 If I do that, I will spend a week fixated on one sentence…and then, two pages later, realize that the sentence doesn’t even belong.\u00a0 So my method is to write first draft with very little revision (if I see a typo as I write it, I might fix it.\u00a0 I will stop and think about word choices sometimes, and often stop–several times a day at least–to do some serious thinking about the deep logic.)\u00a0 Get it all down, throw everything into the mix that could possibly belong, and then start rearranging, culling, shifting, and the rest of it.\u00a0 (I already know that one long sequence with Arvid does not belong in this book…it’s temporally out of place.\u00a0 But for the moment, it’s reminding me of what happened before this book started, on his timeline, so I haven’t pulled it yet.)<\/p>\n
Braiding the different POVs together before the end has the disadvantage that they can all have growth plates, and it’s hard to tell which part of the book may be growing out of proportion, but that, again, can be seen and fixed during the phase-one revision.\u00a0 Waiting until the end to braid has the disadvantage that you have to add up the word counts of every file every time.<\/p>\n
But–11 pm and time for bed, now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some Mondays feel more like the working writer than others.\u00a0 This past weekend, I deliberately took both Saturday and Sunday off from the book.\u00a0 I hoped this would generate some pressure from the book to start of the week, and\u00a0 I had plenty of other things to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[62,20,107],"class_list":["post-847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-progress-report","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":848,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions\/848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}