Novel Update #5 - Halfway Done!

Hit 60K in my manuscript!!

Celebration!

Today is a really exciting day—I cleared 60,000 words written for my novel! This officially puts me at the halfway mark for what I estimated the first draft's word count should be.

If you're curious why my word count is only now hitting 60K when I've had different word counts before for this book, it's because these are quality words. What do I mean by that? In this case, I've been working on this book for so long that there were a lot of scenes written that, as the book has evolved, have needed to be cut. So I did a massive deletion of everything that no longer could/would be in the novel at the end of Jan 2023, dropping me down to around 43K words.

I won't lie; that sucked so much—but the book will be better for it. Now, all that is left is the writing worth keeping and the new words I've added to my manuscript. In other terminology: quality words.

I thought it might be nice to go into a bit of my process for writing this book so far since it's a significant milestone for me.

Save The Cat! Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody

Outlining:

I figured out the 1st draft needed to be around 120,000 words by using the novel Save The Cat! Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody. I used her method (based on Blake Snyder's method) to outline my book properly for the first time. This involved using the beat sheet she provides and breaking the book's scenes to fit into the universal stories, as Brody explains. 

Pages and pages later, I finally had a firm idea of where this story was going—more than vague notions and disjointed ideas. Finally, I had a cohesive plot with more than just a beginning, middle, and end. This has a structure with beats that make sense and build upon each other. It was so exciting to see the whole story start to come together.

This was also when I realized I needed to cut a bunch of things I'd already written, rearrange some scenes, and even remove a few characters. A good tip I've used is when you have to cut something from your book, put the deleted parts in a separate document so you don't feel like you're deleting it forever.

This outline and planning also led to me starting to write faster because I now had every scene/chapter at least mapped out with a sentence or two.

I did this outlining process and then looked at how many chapters I needed to bring this outline to life. I decided to average 3000 words per chapter for a total first draft word count of 120,000. I tend to write very bare-boned at first—picking better words and lovely descriptions are for later drafts, as far as I'm concerned. This means that my final draft will most likely be significantly longer, but that's okay because molding a manuscript into something sparkly and engaging is one of my favorite parts of writing.

Rachel Aaron's 2K to 10K

Writing Even Faster:

So I had my outline and was getting work done, but I still felt like I wasn't going as fast as I'd like if I wanted to finish this book before the next decade. So to that end, I started reading Rachel Aaron's 2K to 10K. It's the book version of her writing productivity blog posts that went viral years ago. Rachel Aaron is one of my favourite authors, and I felt like any advice she had was worth listening to.

I cannot recommend this book enough. Aaron explains how she went from writing 2K words a day to 10K a day while not changing her actual writing hours. She attributes it to what she calls her triangle metric. It consists of three sides: Knowledge, Time, and Enthusiasm.

For knowledge, she talks about how she started bullet point-drafting each scene before she wrote it. Then, she discusses how it helped her determine what would work and what wouldn't within the scene. This way she doesn't waste time writing something she'd just have to delete later (as often). 

The second metric is time. Aaron talks about how she started tracking in excel how long she was writing, where she was writing, word count, and words per hour. Then she took that information and used it to figure out when and where she was most productive and fiercely guarded those times for herself and her writing.

The last side is enthusiasm. She talks about how she started thinking through each of her scenes, and if it didn't spark enthusiasm to write, she decided it wouldn't be entertaining to read. This means she only kept scenes that she was excited to write—no forcing herself to write a thing just to move the plot along. If it was a scene that needed to stay in, she tweaked it until she was excited about it.

It's a great book, and—even though I'm not done reading it yet—I've already started implementing the triangle to (unsurprisingly) great success. So, after days of averaging around 700 words an hour, I sat down in a coffee shop I liked and wrote. 

I focused for just over two hours and wrote just over 3000 words!

My writing tracker modeled after Rachel Aaron’s in her book 2K to 10K.

It took around ~300 words to finish the scene I'd been last working on. Then, I jotted down the major points for the following two scenes in my notebook. And then I wrote and didn't stop. I didn't have to halt and think about what I wanted to happen next. Actually, at one point, while I was plotting in my notebook, I realized something I'd jotted above didn't work, crossed it out, put a different idea down that worked, and kept going. Had I not caught that issue then, I probably would have deleted at least 1000 words elsewhere.

This has been revolutionary for my productivity and writing speed!

Mindset:

The last thing I've started trying to implement is taking to heart the idea that you can't edit a blank page. More importantly, I needed to permit myself to have a shitty first draft. So that's what I've been doing. This draft will never see the light of day because it's BAD. Words are being repeated at a frequency even I'm disgusted by, emotions feel all over the place, everyone has the same three ways they move, etc. But it's getting written. The bones of the epic tale I want to tell are there, waiting for me to finish assembling its skeleton so I can make it better.

Feelings About This Milestone:

I can't even begin to describe the elation and simultaneous relief when I hit 60K today. I've written over 18K words just this month (a day left to get that number higher!), and it feels like the more I work on this book and see the gains being made, the more I feel like publishing it is actually attainable. It's cool to feel like something I've wanted and dreamed of for so long may actually be possible and a little closer than previously believed.

Obviously, there's a lot more to do; Another 60K words in this draft, subsequent drafts, beta reading, editing, etc., but it's more than a start, and I'm proud. 

I'm going back to writing now; Elena and Wesley are about to have an argument I've been excited all day to flesh out.

Thanks for reading!