My story is complete. It’s just not completely written.
I have tens of thousands of words of plot that I have committed to paper or Word document or OneDrive while feeling particularly inspired over the last couple of years. As a result, I have a whole story from front to back. I can answer every question there may be about my story. My conflict, my resolution, my character relationships, my backstory, my world and its history. Even my backstory has backstory – but that’s probably somewhere down the road.
So I now that I have a complete story, on to the manuscript. This is the hard part for me. Crafting my storyline into a novel. I am a perfectionist. Not in the I am perfect sense, but in the it has to be right sense. For me, this means that before I write anything new, I have to start from where I began and read everything over with fresh eyes for consistency, accuracy, color, tone, pace, POV and plain old how-does-it-sound. I correct typos. I fill in left out words and take out the unnecessary ones. AFTER, I have critiqued and edited my own writing, I then move on. By then, I am re-involved in the storyline and am moving with it.
While this method really works for me in terms of being able to pull out a page or two at any given point in time to demonstrate my work and writing style, it is laboriously slow in the production department. I have a tendency to creep along with maybe 300-500 words at a sitting. Sometimes that might include the editing! I do, however, feel a particular satisfaction after reading through what I’ve already written and can’t find anything to improve upon.
I never fail to be amazed when someone says “I wrote 1200 words today.” Or even more so amazed at 2000 words in a day! Maybe if I didn’t have a day job or a three-year-old, a husband, and a boxer, it might be different. Maybe I’m doing it all wrong. The only times I have ever been able to sit down and peck out 1000 words was when I was inspired about a storyline and I needed to commit the ideas into notes. Oh, I could easily give you 1000 words then! Maybe even 1500. And even though I wasn’t really thinking about the words I used, or sentence structure, or consistency, or color, it STILL took a good while to accomplish.
So then I wonder… When other writers are doing it 1000 words at a shot, are they really writing the manuscript, or just the story? Sometimes I sit there with my fingers on the keys waiting for the right descriptive words. I’ve already covered the plot and what’s going to happen, now I just need to make it interesting. I’ve read the work of a few others who are a little greener than I am in the writing arena, and their stuff read like a synopsis. One guy in particular was a prolific writer who could sit down and bang out story after story. But his stories read like my plot notes. I’m not saying that he’s a bad writer, just maybe really young at it and in need of more practice and development.
At any rate, by the time I finish my current chapter, it will be tidy without any reason to look back unless I just want to refresh a bit. That’s how I like it. That part’s done, now let’s put it away and move on. And when it’s time for the rewrite, hopefully there won’t be much to do.
