A Monstrous Amount of Words

Me: Woohoo! I have 11 chapters done in Isto so far.

Friend: Go you!!

Me: Scary tidbit: 11 chapters is 60K.

Friend: Holy f***, Dude.

I’m not even halfway through, and I’ve written 143K toward what I believe is mostly keepable content for Isto. Crazy right? Of that amount, I’ve only got 11 chapters worth of chronological, coherent story.

Isto has multiple POVs. I tend to hop into one POV and stick there until I run out of whatever I’ve visualized in my head. Maybe it’s that scene where Cameron gets literally kicked off a cliff, or the one where Derek gets kidnapped by the earth element. I just jump around and write whatever is most exciting to me and come back to tie the scenes together with transitions later.

She has her sword!

Yet in my hopping, I neglected MaTisha and LaTonya. I had placeholder scenes in earlier chapters (like 8 and 9–my goal from last week, which I accomplished BTW) saying “MaTisha protects the palace” or “LaTonya gets a sword”. But those scenes morphed as things do with my writing. They turned into three or four scenes apiece. In fact, I’m still trying to get LaTonya her sword (hopefully in chapter 12).

And the word count keeps growing.

At least I approach my words as I do my characters. I may have a ton of them, but there’s no guarantee they won’t get killed before I reach the end. *evil grin*

Do you tend to write a lot and cut later? Do you jump around and write whatever scenes inspire you or force yourself to follow a linear plan? What do you think of my LaTonya picture?

The post A Monstrous Amount of Words appeared first on Squirrel Talk.