We all know that writing is hard work. Writing a novel is hard work.
If you follow many authors, they will talk about how hard it is to write a novel, how much they learn every time they write a novel, all of that lovely jazz.
Let me tell you: they are not kidding.
Let me start by saying, I am in the second round of edits for my first full-length fiction novel.
It is a romance.
The first thing I learned is: I can write romance. This may never qualify as a Harlequin romance (no shade here; it’s just the first thing that comes to mind when I think romance…), but it IS a romance novel.
I do not write love stories, at least not typically. I don’t read them.
When I was a teenager, I spent one summer in the house reading my grandmother’s romance novel stash because that was all that was in the house…and I sweat my IQ dropped by thirty points, but let’s not degrade the genre I now write. Not only do I have Romance Novel #1 (her WIP. name is Novel #1– catchy, right?), but I have no less than three more lined up once I finish this one completely.
I have to be mad to write romance if I genuinely hated it, wouldn’t I?
Or would I?
I’m still pondering that one.
The second thing I learned is that I CAN write between two thousand and five thousand words daily unless I am seriously unwell. I did not realize this about myself.
Not only can I write that many words, but they all go into the same novel. All the words make up the same story. All together.
I spent the month of July doing a 2000 words a day for 30 days challenge…and I not only met the challenge, but I surpassed it. I wrote over 65000 words in that month, for my novel and not for anything else.
The kicker is that I wrote nearly 20,000 words for OTHER PROJECTS at the same time. Another blow me away moment that I didn’t know that I could manage.
The next thing I learned is — and I wish I had learned this so much earlier in my life, maybe I would have pushed myself harder to write and to finish a novel before this: you do not have to write your novel in order, scene by scene, from beginning to end. You can start with the ending, write the beginning, then write the middle. You can write a little of the middle, maybe some of the ending, and then go back to the beginning. It doesn’t matter HOW you write your novel. All that matters is that you write.
After reading several “writers books” on how to write your first novel, I was shaking in my boots about crafting the “perfect” opening scene…and I could not for the life of me do it. I started working on this months before I joined the July writing challenge.
I believe it was Release The Word Kraken on YouTube (bless her to the Nth degree, baby, because listening to her videos has helped me more than I can say.) who made the comment about not being required to write a novel in order…
The only problem I had with this was…my characters kept changing the darn storyline as I went along…which is why editing is such a pain in the tuckus at the moment because I have to go along and follow every thread they threw up at me and see…are we keeping this, are we tossing that, where the heck did this come from, where did it go, why? Why? WHY? Ahem…
However, writing in bits in pieces, writing back and forth like this, also gave me something else: freedom from writer’s block.
No matter where I was, in the middle of a scene, between scenes, writing a new scene, whatever, if nothing was coming, especially if my characters had changed everything I had planned and outlined and decided to zag when I had planned to zig and I sat there baffled and blundering around in what should be my story but wasn’t…I would let that go for the session, the day, for fifteen minutes, and write something completely different.
That completely different writing would prime the pump, open the valves, and off I would go into whatever else awaited me and I never had to stop, never had to pause, not after that first time.
Another thing I learned it’s ok to write a whole bunch of stuff just for my own edification about the story and the characters.
It doesn’t matter how many character sheets you’ve done, or if you traced each character in the entire novel back twenty-two generations, or dissected each character up and down as if you were profiling a serial killer, once you begin to write, anything can change. Or you may jump in and not know something for the entire novel and then, boom, out of nowhere, your character springs something on you and you sit there banging your head on your desk for ten minutes while you try to figure out what the heck to do with this information.
The first edit of Novel #1 cut roughly thirty thousand words from the draft. A sixty-five thousand plus word manuscript, instant (well, as instant as I could make it before I printed the whole thing out) surgery. Because the Reader doesn’t need to know all this weird off-kilter stuff. The Reader doesn’t need to see these story threads that went nowhere for this novel (but may be used in future novels since, hey, nice ideas there, guys, thanks).
All of that that I cut is now part of the historical build-up of my story and the future of my characters (or the past, depending), but for this novel, it isn’t needed for or by the Reader.
My goal is to have a book with a word count of fifty to seventy thousand words by the end of the … third rewrite (had to check my notes).
And I also learned: you can write a whole damned novel and not know a lot of the most basic details. There are three children in this novel — and I STILL have no clue how old they are yet. Seriously. There are scenes with the children in this book. Nice scenes. Domestic scenes. Playing games. Craft projects. Nothing untoward.
Now, the absolute BEST thing I learned from writing 2000+ words per day for 30 days in July of this year is: I can write a full-length fiction novel. And even though that first draft sucks so bad, the story is sound and the story is good.
I can edit this baby. I can rebuild her in the places she needs to be rebuilt. I can add to her in places where she is lacking. I can make her better, with a hammer and a chisel, and my trusty laptop…I can make her good enough to let other people read her, on purpose.
I will continue to update you on my author journey as I flow along. I hope you stick around for the ride.
Tabitha Low 