I was walking home today, and I usually space out and think about all sorts of crap when I take a good walk. This time, I was thinking about writing. I thought about work because I've got a lot of revisions on my plate right now and I've got to get them done fairly quickly. Then I thought about my 3-Day Novel. I started to examine the logistics of this thing.
Crap.
Currently, I write 2000 words a day without going crazy. I feel confident in the quality of what I write and I spend a lot of time going over and revising before I submit my meager 2000 words. With three days to get 30,000 words written, that puts me a touch over 2000. Just a touch. Okay, a lot. I've got to do five times that, that's 10,000 words, in a day.
It was about then that I asked myself, "What the devil was I thinking?"
So, I'm going to put myself to the test a little bit over the next few days. I do have a lot of revisions to do, and I do have to do them rather quickly. I'll consider this practice and see if I can still write with the quality that I want in a short time frame. Since this is my job, I'm not going to sacrifice quality for number, but I want to push my limits a bit. I'm hoping this will give me a bit of a clue about just how hard next week-end is going to be.
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4 comments:
Dude, your outline is the key. Trust me. If you have a good outline that includes everything you might normally have to stop and think about, then all you have to do is put your head down and push through the writing.
G-
I'd listen to the shortlister.
My main issue du jour is that I'm just not sure how detailed I want my outline to be. I know that I do a lot of my best creating on the fly, but I also know full well that too much of that leads to disaster.
And, wow, I just realized. I have a letter to mail. With a check. And my registration form. I meant to do that on Tuesday. Duh-errr
For me, detail was very important to my outline. I didn't worry about dialogue because that writes itself, but such things as character names, names for restaurants and other locations, details about the setting, facts people would know... these are all things I can spend hours researching online and dithering over. You don't have researching and dithering time during the 3-Day, so I put such things into the outline.
I also had a few blocks of useful stuff at the top of my outline. One was a list of full names for characters that I could draw from as needed. Another was a list of business names and local colour. The third was a list of anecdotes, stories, and topics of conversation, for when the characters were in a car or something and I wanted them to get to know each other but I also wanted them to have something to say besides, "Nice weather we're having." Which, in the Dominion... it's pretty much always nice weather they're having, because that's what they pay for. Always snow at Christmas. Hallowe'en? Always a dark and stormy night.
G-
Yeah. I was there. :)
For you, I know detail was key, because you get hung up on names and little details like that very easily, but you write at a fucking freight train pace as long as you have that shit nailed down.
For me, names and little details are not so problematic. I get more hung up on my pacing, and on my speed.
I know damned well that I don't ever want to have to stare at the pages and say, "What the hell do I do know?"
On the other hand, part of what drives me against my own native laziness is the thrill of making new stuff up.
I'm a bit worried that if I map everything out in detail in my outline then, in my mind, I'll have told the story, and the weekend then is just fucking joyless work.
In which case, i worry about my discipline.
Self-knowledge can be an ugly thing.
So, I'm trying to walk a fine line between too much, and not enough.
Right now, basically, I have broken the novel into 16 chunks of story that NEED to be there for the story to work. Essentially, I'm writing the early part of a longer novel, though in such a way that I believe it stands alone.
For each of those chunks I have a couple of sentences that indicate precisely what needs to happen to push this story forward.
I've not gone into more detail than that.
I do intend to have a period map of North America at hand, average travel times between several of these places on horseback, and a list of characters and places as well. I am doing this, at least in part to act as a safeguard against accidentally renaming characters on the fly. That could happen in the blearier parts of the day.
The map is key for me, and the travel times. It's too easy to forget how fucking long it took to get places back then.
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