So, I Wrote A Book in About Two Weeks
This is me sticking my head up, well, from writing most of a book in two weeks. I discovered something about myself this month. Several things, actually. This post is primarily for writers, so if you don’t care about the novelist’s process, check back in a few days for updated pet pictures.
In the meantime, here’s some stuff I learned:
1. If I can get characters and plot really nailed down, I can write forty thousand words in two weeks. Now, I’ve never written more than 25K words in a month before, so this was a revelation.
Unfortunately, it took me fourteen months to get to that point. Next step is to figure out how to speed up *that* process.
2. I have a hybrid plotting process. I start out by writing with no concrete plan, but maybe a vague idea of the major plot points. Then when I get 30-50 pages, I can’t go any farther without knowing what happens, which is when I start to plot in earnest.
Now, that first 30-50 pages isn’t necessarily all the first part of the book; it might be all the really pivotal scenes from beginning to end. Or it could be one or two of them.
The first kiss, the turning point where the hero(es) figure out the big conflict is inevitable and decide how to handle it, the closing scene–any or all of them could be in there. After that I have to figure out the holes and fill them.
For this last book, I ended up making a list of scenes, then color coding them: pink for the heroine’s character arc, blue for the hero’s character arc, green for the relationship arc, black for external plot, and yellow highlighting for scenes that hadn’t had a version written yet.
From June 1 to June 26, I added more than 43,000 words to this manuscript, cutting about two thousand (that I counted). The next step is to send it out to critique partners and beta readers and see if what I wrote actually makes sense.
And then I send it to my editor with fingers crossed, LOL.
Love the idea of color coding. That’s next on my list.