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I've been writing!
Monday, April 05, 2004I have. I'm doing really good right now. I'm spending a lot of time with Drachen, under the surface of the sea. I meant to enact a certain feel with the reader through Sorrenna, my human character who will eventually become a mermaid/Mirrim, if things go right. (Though every time, so far she's had the spell to change her in her grasp, it's fled.) See, there's a long standing convention in fantasy that has driven so many books...you have a person, ordinary bloke living in our boring, tired, mundane world, and somehow he/she gets pulled through into a fantasy world. What makes that so darned alluring a story line is that you and I, vicariously, go through into that other world in the main character's head, and share in that feeling of pleasurable discovery. We all see the things brand new...the dragons, the magic, at the exact same time. For that reason, that feeling of wonder that automatically comes if it's done right (For example, Gaiman's Neverwhere...one of the things I love about Richard is that he's too busy being in awe to ever be worried, or think, "Where the heck am I?") I was going to have Sorrenna...and us...go into the sea at the same time, see the Mirrim city and culture first hand. Drachen, who's already gone back to being Mirrim (hence the point of the book) has other plans, and I've been writing some really wonderful scenes that most definitely come before Sorrenna gets her tail. ************** OK. The reason why I've been able to write is because I've given my self a Schedule. How, you may wonder, does a writer make a schedule for herself when she doesn't know how long her first draft is going to be? It's fairly easy...and it's something that could work for you, too, since most of us work better with a goal/deadline. First, what's your general per day word count? I shoot for 2,000 words a day, partially because that's what Stephen King does, and partially because I usually can do that. The next number you need is a first draft word count goal. For most books, 100,000 words is a good average...some mysteries are around 80,000, some fantasies are 150,000...but 100,000 is a nice, round number. Now, I'd already started my book, so I subtracted the word count I already had from 100,000...and that number, I divided by 2,000. That gave me a number of days that it would take, if I wrote 2,000 words every day, to reach 100,000 words. I counted those days out on my calendar, not counting weekends (which I use for other things.) Now I have a goal...and I will do whatever I have to to reach that goal. If I can't write 2,000 a few days, I know I'll have days when I write much more. When I get closer to that date, I'll reevaluate, and adjust my daily word count accordingly, though now I have a goal, I'll probably get done sooner. I do the same thing for the second draft, using the existing word count as my other divisor. For the other drafts, I use pages...I try and do ten pages a day, say, instead. Permalink Cindy scribed this at 6:11 PM 0 comments |