Hey look, it’s Saturday!
If you’re following our schedule, you may have noticed that I failed to post on Wednesday (whoops!), so I’m making up for it today. I trained for a new job all last week and let the day go by before I realized I’d forgotten to update. The good news: I’m going to be working from home, which gives me more time to write!
So, during my last check-in, I said I wanted to write 10,000 words by this time. Well, I came pretty close. I managed to get down a little over 8,000. 6,000 of it was all in one day! It was a VERY inspired day spent doing practically nothing but writing. Those days don’t come along very often, but I love it when they do.
My book has also had a bit of a facelift over the past few weeks. The story started taking a different turn, and I realized that much of what I had already written was no longer necessary. It was hard to keep writing with that knowledge in the back of my mind, and I started to get so frustrated that I literally, physically just could not keep going without doing something about it. So I went back and revamped the entire book, all 45K of it. I rewrote scenes, changing key points. I completely deleted some scenes and wrote entirely new ones. The finished product ended up being about 15K short of my original word count, but after writing that 8K I’m back up to almost 40K.
That may seem counterproductive, but the truth is, I needed to do it. I wouldn’t have been able to keep writing otherwise. The story had changed, and everything needed to adjust before I could go on. And honestly, I feel much better because I feel like I’ve already gotten part of my rewrites done. Sure, my word count is lower, but I saved everything I cut in a separate Word document titled “Cuts” just in case, and instead of feeling like this about so many parts of my manuscript, I now feel content with what I have and more prepared to go on.
One of the sad truths of writing is that sometimes a lot of what you write doesn’t make the final cut and may never be seen by anyone but you, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth writing. Even though I had to take out those scenes and words, I wouldn’t have gotten to the point I’m at now without them. My story has developed so much as I’ve written it, and in many ways it’s very different from what I had originally envisioned, but I needed to write to figure that out, to allow it to develop and change…for the better. And those words I’m not using? They served their purpose, and I’m grateful I wrote them because through them, I was able to figure out what my book truly needed to be at this point in my noveling journey.
It may happen again. I may write another 30K words and get to the end of the book only to realize I need to go back and cut more scenes. I know I’m probably still going to have to do some major rewriting. But that doesn’t mean what I have now is worthless, no matter how poorly written some of it may be. It all serves a higher purpose, and in the end, every word counts, whether it makes the final cut or not.
My goal for next time? I’m going to continue the awesome trend of self-love that we seem to have going here on TGNA. My goal is simply to keep writing. Keep letting the story take me where it needs to go. Another 8K or even 10K words would be nice, but as long as I’m writing and working on making my story as good as I can, that’s all that matters.