Pushed hard to finish the book this weekend. I finished chapter 20 on Saturday, thinking it was finished. Quickly decided that wasn’t the case and pushed on to chapter 21. Wrote 13 pages between Saturday and Sunday. Today was my last free day to get this done so I went at it even harder. Wrapped up chapter 21 with 21 pages (funny how that works out). Quickly wrote up a short three page epilogue and the book is done. Holy crap, what a feeling! It’s both over and underwhelming. I’m crazy excited to have come this far and really eager to push this book out the door, but now it’s time to take a break for a week or two. Come back with fresh eyes so I can get the first edit done properly. In the meantime I’m going to start on some ideas I have for short stories. Tomorrow anyway. Onward and upward!
Monthly Archives: November 2013
Ending a Novel
I finished up chapter 20 today, which wrapped up the climax shown in the prologue. That meant it was time for a big decision: do I end the book here? My first inclination was that yes, I should end it here. After all, the climax itself was resolved in a very thorough manner. It would be a bit of a cliffhanger, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I am certainly eager to be done with this story as well. Impatient really as I can’t wait to get to the whole editing and publishing part. So when I finished chapter 20, I was ready to throw in the towel. Write a little epilogue so I didn’t leave readers hanging completely and call it done. It was the reaction from my girlfriend, who has been reading this story as I wrote it chapter by chapter, that changed my mind and got me to thinking. I was super excited to be done. She was very much not excited. I’ve asked her not to give me any feedback until I do my first edit since I have a list of things I’m going to add/change anyway. She’s done a great job sticking to my request too. It was her tone that gave it away though. She was very disappointed.
So I’ve been thinking about it all day now and even tried to put myself in the readers’ shoes. The story is really for them after all. Then I realized ending the story right here might just piss people off. I spent a lot of time and effort tiptoeing around a lot of secrets and subtext because my main character is completely in the dark about all of this and all of the others are actively keeping things that way. The climax is the breaking point, not just of the action, but of the information. I realized that if I didn’t keep going, I wasn’t going to give the readers the payoff they deserve for being in the dark along with the main character. This is why I’m two pages into chapter 21 and actually pretty glad I’m still going. I still plan to finish the book this weekend, it just means I’ll be doing more writing than I thought.
All of the writers that I’ve researched have said pretty much the same thing about writing a novel, or anything really: make it as long as it needs to be and no more. I have been keeping a close watch on my page and word counts because it gives me a feeling of accomplishment to look back every week or two and see just how far I’ve come. This being my first novel, the process has felt pretty long and drawn out. This has been discouraging at times so I always write down my page and word total when I finish a chapter. In the beginning, I was also worried that this story would be far too short. I grew up reader authors like Robert Jordan, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others. When I was that age I also thought that writing stories that long was what it took to be an author. Thankfully I am content these days to compare myself only to myself. For the most part. I’m doing this for me, because it’s fun and it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. So I am happy with how long my book has turned out to be, and amused that I was worried it would be too short. Character development takes awhile after all, or at least it does for me. Either way, I’m still crazy excited to be almost done!
Crisis of Confidence
Wow, almost two months since my last post here. Didn’t think it had been that long ago. Well, as the title suggests I went through a bit of a crisis of confidence where my writing was concerned. I took what was supposed to be a short break at the beginning of October. That turned into almost three weeks of little or no writing on my book. It coincided with the whole government shutdown and furlough thing. You’d think being stuck at home would inspire me to write non-stop, but I couldn’t stop worrying about when we’d get to go back to work and how I was going to pay my bills if we didn’t get back soon. So instead of writing I played Terraria, which conveniently enough had a content release the same day the shutdown started. Go figure.
It wasn’t until I’d been back at work for a week or two that I really started thinking about my writing a lot. It had been there the whole time in the back of my mind, but I didn’t feel good about how my story was turning out. I was also stuck. I didn’t know how to get where I needed to with the story. So all of this was on my mind most days at work. In the end though, I think my job was what convinced me to try to get back to writing. I know, through and through, that I can’t handle doing the 9 to 5 for the rest of my life. The daily commute and traffic, parking nightmares, tedious work, and soul sucking monotony just aren’t conducive to having a happy life. That ultimately got me to sit down one night and try to pick up where I’d left off.
It was a new chapter, so I had an empty page just staring at me as I tried to think of how I wanted the story to go. Then I remembered Stephen King’s advice from his book On Writing: just write. Do it. Doesn’t matter if it’s good, bad, amazing, or the worst bit of drivel the world has ever seen. Write. Don’t worry about it. Silence the inner critic and worrier. Just write. And that’s what I did. I looked at where the last chapter left off, then thought about what the main character would likely be doing at that point. Didn’t worry if it was mundane or not, I just started back up. It wasn’t as easy as before I’d taken the break. It took me a couple of nights to really get back into the flow of the story. I did hit my word count minimum each night though, and once I was past the rough spot in the story I was excited to be writing again.
At this point I also went back to Dean Wesley Smith’s website to check out some of the other sections about writing and publishing that I hadn’t gotten around to reading yet. The section called Think Like a Publisher was incredibly informative. It’s all about self-publishing, put into simple terms. He laid out just how easy it is to publish your own work, and that’s made me more pumped about writing than ever. Last weekend I decided to try and make a big push on my book and managed to write over twice as much as I usually do. When I stopped to check my progress the other day, I realized I’m nearly done. It’s hard to describe how it feels to have come this far and to see the finish line ahead. With a longer weekend coming up my goal is to have it all finished by next Monday. I am incredibly excited to get this finished, but I’m also more hopeful than ever about my future in writing.
Mr. Smith basically provides a step-by-step guide to the process of publishing as well as how to succeed as an Indie publisher. I know this first book is just the beginning for me, and I can’t wait to get started on my next project.
Oh, interestingly enough this month is National Novel Writing Month. It’s an annual challenge where writers sign up on http://nanowrimo.org/ and try to write a novel within the month. I’ve thought about trying it myself, but I just don’t have the time to write a second novel while I’m still finishing my first and working the exhausting 9 to 5 still. Of course, the novel only has to be 50k words. Not too difficult to get done in 30 days. That’s only about 1666 words a day. My current minimum is 1k. If I get my current book done by next Monday, that will leave me with 19 days of the month. That’s a little over 2600 words a days to hit the 50k mark by November 30th. I’ll think about it. If I don’t do it this year, I definitely want to try next year. Maybe by then I’ll be writing full time!
If you’d like to check out Dean Wesley Smith’s site, it’s right here: