My Journey #4: And Let the Writing Begin!

In my prior to posts I talked about where ideas come from and outlining your novel. I think I spent about 6-8 weeks preparing to write my book, from researching how to structure a novel, to developing an outline, to building character backstories. I probably could have gone overboard and continued to refine my outline, but I wanted to leave some wiggle room for creativity and change as I developed the story. In any case, I was getting antsy to start writing, and so I did.

On my first day, I was able to squeeze in about 15 minutes of writing in the early morning before my kids woke up and found me on the patio with a cup of coffee. On the second day, I grabbed 20 minutes at bedtime after the kids when to sleep and before I passed out with exhaustion. My first efforts produced 1,500 words. This made me feel a bit inadequate after seeing authors on Facebook post that they wrote 10,000 words in a single day. It’s hard to put that into context until you start writing.

I have read that there are approximately 200 words per page, and the average novel should be between 300-500 pages, or 60,000-100,000 words. That might put it into some context. It ended up taking me two weeks to write my first 2 chapters – 8,422 words. That’s less than some writers produce in a day! I might have been slow in comparison, but it was more for lack of available time than writers block.

In fact, I found that I was able to write the first few chapters fairly easily. The story flowed out of me, and I attribute that to having done the outlining work in advance. The outline gave me guidelines, but I still found that I left myself enough flexibility to make modifications as I went along. Also, my first three chapters are heavy on the action to draw the reader in. The next two chapters involved more dialog and character interaction. I found that writing the action scenes came fairly easily to me, but I struggle a bit with the dialog.

I have found myself hitting spots where I can’t easily find the right words, or just the right description, or even the right sequence of action. But rather than getting stuck in those places, I make a note in brackets at that point in the text, highlight it so I can easily come back to it, and then I move on. I refuse to allow myself to get bogged down trying to make it perfect the first time. I figure that I can always come back later and fix it – it’s more important just to get the first draft down on paper. My method is to then return to those highlighted sections after I finish the chapter and clean them up before moving on to the next chapter. This process seems to be working well for me so far.

As of this blog post, I have completed the first five chapters. The biggest challenge I have had so far is in finding people willing to read it and provide me feedback! I have given it to all of my family members, but no one has yet had the time to read it (running Love Between the Sheets is a big job after all). My husband is the only one to read the entire story, but I would prefer someone more objective. If there are any beta readers out there interested in helping me out, please PM me!

Given the challenges I have had in getting feedback, I started seeking out local writing groups in my area. In my next blog post, I’ll tell you more about that experience. Talk to you next week!