Letting it Stew
During NaNoWriMo 2021, I pushed out nearly 90,000 words on a now-abandoned sci-fi novel.
Back then, I was firmly entranced in the mantra of never stop writing. No matter what. To that end, I pushed through rough patches in the outline and rarely made changes to the overall structure. The result was a poorly-executed story that wound up so shallow you couldn’t even drown in it if you tried.
In my post about Disconnecting Creativity from Productivity, I talked a little about how I’ve changed my writing style. But today, I want to focus in on of my favorite new techniques: thinking about stuff.
As of right now, I’m about 38k words into Where the Fog Falls, which puts me at little under 1k words per day since I started the manuscript. The only significance of this number is that it shows how much I’ve slowed my process down. And while some of that time is focused on relaxing and maintaining my mental health, the bulk of it is taking the time to process my outlined plan for a scene and where it’s actually going.
Past me always viewed this technique as blasphemy – why slow down when there’s writing to be done? – but forcing myself to consider how each scene impacts the threads of a story has resulted in some very interesting outcomes that I never intended. And while some of them feel a little long in the tooth with how much novel there is left to write, their inclusion has only strengthened what I thought was already a pretty strong concept.
Allowing myself the time to think and tweak and think and tweak means its taken two or three days to get through some of the more pivotal scenes, but every one feels right. And as much as my lizard brain keeps screaming that I should speed up, because I could get the novel done by the end of the month, I’m forcing myself to ignore it and produce writing that’s of a far higher quality.
All that said, I’m near the halfway point of Where the Fog Falls, right before the shit hits the fan. The second half is set to be a whirlwind for the main character, but I’m holding myself to a steady pace in order to make sure that as many words as possible are where they’re supposed to be in the initial draft. This means discipline and lots and lots of thinking…
