I finished the first draft of a novel today. It's a bigger project than I've ever completed before and it feels great to be done, but my favorite part of the whole thing was how slowly I wrote it.
I'm a fast person. I work under fast deadlines, I have good reflexes, and I learn quickly (most of the time, anyway). And every time I've tried to write a longer piece, I go as fast as possible and then flame out halfway through, producing nothing but a messy pile of words and ideas that would need to be totally rewritten. That's even if I get to the halfway point; I have first chapters and outlines and treatments, all these undone beginnings, stinking up my hard drive like a fridge in need of a deep-clean.
Last year, I decided to take an overstuffed, unsuccessful short story and turn it into a novel. My first thought was that I should carve out two weeks in the summer, cobble together a DIY residency, and write like crazy to slam out a draft in something like 12 days.
But then I read a Facebook post by my friend Hannah Pass. In addition to being a wonderful writer, she's a much more thoughtful person than I am. After her baby was born, she started working on a book a sentence at a time, because that was all she had the space for. My own kiddo was seven, then, but I still realized that I don't have the time or mental focus to sprint any more - and that sprinting had never served me well to begin with. It was time to cut against that thirst for NaNoWriMo glory, my instincts, and yeah, my ADHD, too.
So I did the math: what if, instead of carving out two weeks in six months, I just wrote a little bit each day during that time instead? If I wrote just 500 words a day (about a page and a half), then I'd hit novel length in that same six-month span... without having to abandon my kiddo and partner, without finding a chunk of time, and without the stress of doing something essentially impossible. And maybe taking it slow would mean it would turn out better. It couldn't make the process worse.
Instead of waiting, I started writing. (It helped that I had the short story as a guide; it gave me a good idea for a big mystery that could propel the first act.) I finally got around to using Scrivener, a program I paid for years ago that's been gathering dust in my dock. It was worth it just for the Target Word Count feature. The little bar turns green when you've done your 500 words - instant dopamine!
In addition to the word count idea, I lurched my way into some other rules as I went along:
- Overage is fine, but doesn't count towards the next day. In other words, I can't "write ahead". I decided this in an early moment of clarity when I started to be lazy in the name of flexibility. "Oh, I wrote a little extra yesterday, it's fine to skip today." No! Take whatever your word count is and add 500; that's your minimum point to reach that day.
- Notes don't count towards the 500. No plotting ideas, outlines, character sketches, or rewrite notes. I did write all those things, but they were strictly extra. Interestingly, I found it easier and more fun to work on this stuff than in my previous novel-writing attempts, because I was walking rather than sprinting. There was more time to enjoy the scenery.
- Missed days are a big deal that aren't that big a deal. Look, I straight up skipped days. Early on, I literally forgot a couple - lying in bed after a long day of whatever, I would realize that I'd just spaced writing that day. And there were also days I spent entirely at work, 14 hour long days that left no room for anything else. I missed an entire week while I was working an around-the-clock music festival in the desert. The key (for me, at least) was to walk a fine line between beating myself up and forgiving myself. Sometimes I forgave myself outright, other times I tried to double the next day's count. Every time I missed, though, I found it that much harder to start again, and that taught my weirdo ADHD brain something important. (I forget what it was, though.)
- Rewriting's necessary, sometimes. Halfway through, I realized I'd taken the wrong fork in the road. I was bored with what was happening in the story, and that made it harder to want to write. I struggled with the decision for a day or two, but ultimately got rid of the most recent 8,000 words - two weeks of writing! - and started the boring section over again. I discovered that fixing an obviously-terrible part in the moment meant I was inspired enough to over-write for a while, and caught back up pretty quickly.
Some parts of the process were harder than others. My computer died for a few days and I wrote on my phone, sending myself daily e-mails, or I wrote on - ugh - paper. I worked a gig that was really important to me and, for a week, that was the only thing that mattered - I did but didn't notice the writing. But the hardest part of the process was around 30,000 words, about two months in. I didn't know where the story was going and had too many characters doing too many things for no reason, and I found my mind starting to drift to other projects. When I began making notes on how to start a totally different novel, I realized that I was at a make-or-break moment. A younger version of myself might not have made that discovery, might have just flip-flopped. (I know this because I’ve done it.) But maybe I've matured a little, because I decided to just do this project. I wrote through the convoluted section, stopped worrying about some of the extraneous characters (they'll get cut in draft #2 anyway), and ground onwards, 500 words at a time.
The main thing I realized over this experiment is that the only real challenge facing me is myself. If one does the math (and c'mon, we've all done the math), simple multiplication says that a person who can type 80 words a minute can bang out a novel in about 20 hours of typing. That's a week of part-time work. Anything that slows you down from that rate is yourself. But that's not something to regret - that's just how brains work! The first thing I needed to do in order to finish this project was to let go of any sense of how fast I should be writing and just... write.
And let's be clear: it's a first draft. There are characters who change completely for no reason, dead-end plots that need to get trimmed, huge tonal shifts, and themes that either need to get pruned out or added into the remainder. I need to change the name of the town that's the main setting - I just stole the town from The Mercy of the Tides, by Keith Rosson, who is an excellent writer and friend and who says "Just keep plugging away." His incredible persistence was rewarded, recently, by a two-book deal with Random House.
In the end, the first draft of my first book topped out at the upper edge of what publishers will consider for a sci-fi novel (if your name isn't Neal Stephenson, anyway) and finished at 118,000 words. My first editing task it to slash about 35,000 words out of it, to make room for the inevitable stuff I have to add back in. That's cutting two whole months of writing.
But for the first time ever, I'm excited to start going through it. When I do start the editing process, I'm going to take it as slow as ever. The end is in sight, even if it's still a long ways off. In my mid-thirties, older than I've ever been before, I'm finally comfortable with that.