Writer Series: Time to Write
The most important thing I can say that I learned about strictly the writing process would be to take your time. I found it a bit frustrating and disconcerting when I read about the journeys of other authors, some of which wrote their books as Nanowrimo projects. With some people cranking out novels in 30 days, I felt somewhat pathetic and less creative in terms of how quickly ideas came to me and how long it took me to write it all down.
Now I don’t know much about Nanowrimo and I think it’s an impressive feat to write over 50,000 words in 30 days, but unless you are specifically participating in that challenge, I think you have to completely ignore it. I know I did. It was hard for me to limit my comparisons and expectations, but eventually I realized that my journey is my own. Some people can crank out books in days or weeks, others take years. It took me about eight months to finish the writing and initial editing of The Legends of Valtera.
It took eight months, but it wasn’t a consistent effort of producing a certain amount in any given day or week. I didn’t really set goals for myself be it small or large and I think that I would have become increasingly frustrated if I had. Working a full time job, I wrote at night and on the weekends when I had time. At some points, the ideas and writing came easily and others not so much. I remember taking a break probably in the middle and I started the beginnings of another book because a new idea sparked my interest. I wrote around 30,000 words for that new project before I got stuck, then it was back to Valtera again. It was a good break, worthwhile, and it kept me writing.
Maybe some of my issues stem from my writing style. I like to jump around a lot in a story. The general idea and major plot points came rather easily, but I found I had trouble during the in between times. My goal was always 30 chapters and 90,000 words, but the 30 chapters was really important to me. It was easy to separate the story into three acts that way. The word count was probably overly optimistic, but I knew that if I fell short I would still be okay. I did write the beginning few chapters at the start (chapters 1-4), but I quickly moved on to the parts I had a better grasp on what I was trying to achieve (chapter 9). Then it was actually easier for me to write a third/half way through to the end. The middle 10 chapters were by far the easiest because I had a clear outline of what was to transpire in each chapter.
The end (chapters 22-26) only became an issue because those chapters surrounded the character development that I hadn’t even written the baseline for as those were the areas I was stuck on in the beginning. It’s harder and takes longer for me to write filler because I don’t typically have a concrete idea of what I want to happen, I just know in my mind that a certain amount of time has to take place before the next important part.
Towards the end of the eight months, I was jumping around like crazy between my weaker chapters and editing the story as a whole. Reading through the chapters from start to finish, in order, and editing them became my main goal. There was a good amount that I liked and felt strongly about, that it was easier to bridge the gap with the weaker moments and find what was missing overall.
That editing process continued, with input from my mom, until I felt like I didn’t have any more changes to make. Now I’m not saying I thought there was nothing left to be done. Far from it. It was more about believing that I had a good enough manuscript to send off to a third party, professional editor because my author lenses were no longer able to pick up the problems in my story, plot, characterization and development. I knew I was at a good place to achieve positive, yet critical, feedback about the important aspects, such as the overall storyline and cohesiveness, instead of focusing on a wider variety of problems if I had sent my book in earlier. I felt I had produced a good base product that with rewrites I could enhance my overall story to make it better as opposed to having to rewrite and rework major sections of the book.
And after eight months of hard work and writing around 75,000 words, I sent my book off to the amazing people at Bubble Cow (seriously they are awesome) and took a break. My time for purely writing was over for Valtera and it was on to waiting for the next stage in the book writing process to begin.
