the struggle

I've been struggling to keep my writing pace lately. I had hit a few issues with plot that I wasn't sure how to resolve and had to take a break from writing until I could get things back on track

Having just crested the 43,000 word mark, I'm feeling fairly committed to The Novel, the story that's unfolding and the characters that are in precarious or uncomfortable situations and are relying on me to provide an end. It can be grueling some days, when I slog through what feels like hundreds of words and I feel certain that I've nearly met the daily goal only to discover I've accumulated 200 words.

Lately I'm trying to make sure that I'm not straying too far from the first chapter and the struggle that it conveyed. There are a few scenes I'm building toward, weaving character interactions together and revealing more and more backstory. The good news is, I find it pretty interesting and hopefully that's a good sign.

Shutting the door and shutting out the world to write can be a challenge, and stringing word after word after word together is sometimes numbing. But writing brought me back, and despite the frustrations and the annoyances, I return to it again and again.

George Orwell said, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

I have a large drawer full of notebooks and loose pages of notes and drafts and ideas. Some of them are the first incarnation of what I now call The Novel and they present a very different story. Some of the elements have remained the same as I've refined the idea, edited out things I knew weren't right (murdering those darlings) and kept some of the basic ideas. This story has gone through more incarnations that I can count, but it's always been brewing in the back of my mind. And when another idea struck, I saw the two combine - and that's when the current story began to emerge. It's taken years for this story to come forward and some days it's like pulling teeth to get it on the page; others I can't write fast enough.

Writing the First Draft is a lonely process. I have to be tight lipped about the story and work to get it on the page instead of letting it slip away. I think I'm coming up on being near halfway through (if I follow something like a Three Act story model) but I'm going by feel more than word count on that point. This does mean that the book itself might end up being about 86,000 words at its First Draft.

I should probably get back to working on that.

The first draft of anything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway