First Draft silence

Bloggage is sparse (okay, nonexistant!) as I'm deep in the coal mines of a first draft. This is the drudgery work, though I believe it's precisely this, the daily grind, that separates those who want to write from those who do write. Some writers have daily page goals, others have word counts. Others work in chunks, going where the energy is – which I think is really smart, though it's something my linear mind resists. My working pace is 2,000 words a day, which pushes me creatively, though it can be a bit daunting when factoring in Real Life. Still, it gets me comfortably from one place to another in the work, gaining me enough words to progress the story without adversely influencing the quality – which tends to happen when I try for more than that. Oddly, I also tend to clock fewer words if I presume I'm going to get more than 2K in a day. My mind literally balks. So 2K is my comfort zone.

Writers love to talk about this stuff, by the way. I know it comes off as most uncreative – You're thinking of word count instead of Story? – and makes us look less like starry-eyed dreamers than literary pack mules, but here's the magic in daily discipline: somewhere around 700 words in (and the first few hundred are the hardest; your brain – ie. a muscle – is cold and lazy – you'd rather read Op-Eds and design blogs and twitter feeds … or maybe that's just me) you finally warm up to the material. Just past that, and the characters begin to talk. Just after that, they slip away in a new direction, and where a few hours earlier you were pushing, pushing, pushing – now the story is pulling, pulling, pulling, and you're tripping over your own fingers to keep up.

So this is where I disappear to when radio silence commences from this side. This, and the car pool and the laundry room and, yeah, occasionally the bar. Sadly, I'm never as far along in the work as I wish (ideally this draft would have been done two weeks ago) but I have to trust the process enough to know that despite that, I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. Right now that's 85K in, and still clocking 2K a day. I tend to move more fluidly at the end despite doing this odd little mating dance with the climactic scene (C'mon, you know you wanna) so here's hoping that holds true to form, and I can start on the second draft soon. That, of course, has its own pacing … but that, of course, is another blog.