I kept my promise, despite having an ear and headache to keeping to my plans that from the first of February this year, I will write a minimum of 1k words per day towards one set novel, rather than a bunch of them; because I am trying to live by “The One Thing” principle for a while to see how much of a difference it would make to my productivity as a writer.
Today I have written 1354 words towards the dragon fantasy novel, but instead of working for two solid hours like I had planned, I felt in order to prevent burn out – I would stop any time after 1k words if I felt I am getting bored or tired of being in this writing position. Therefore I wrote 1354 words in just one hour and twenty minutes, with a ten minute toilet break in that, so it wasn’t completely tied to the chair.
I have moved in a different direction with this dragon story, focusing more on character development and even added a drama scene in there, which is not something I am known for.
But to me, it works and has made a vast improvement to the plot in general. I feel this story has a firmer future than before because of it and it has given me more freedom to give the characters a future in other potential books. With that being said, this is going to written as a standalone; in case the publishers feel that there shouldn’t be an extension to this story.
Basically what I am trying to say is, this story is going to be more complete by the time I have finished it, without any questions needing answering if the publisher decides that this book should not be a series.
Also, I have noticed that my chapters are shorter than usual because I have learned to condense down a lot over the past few months, which means that the size of the book I am writing will not be epic as I used to fear.
This has not affected the quality of the book negatively, but has improved it tremendously.
I do realise, even now, that there will be another draft, even though this is supposed to be the final draft, because after I had written the previous chapter, I realised there was a certain element I forgot to include in the story, a build-up, the tension was short, the backstory almost non-existent, this will just mean when I have finished this draft entirely in a few weeks’ time, that I will need to add around three pages to make up for the little bits I missed out.
But I am making notes after I have written towards the draft, so I am not distracted from the writing process – this is another thing that is new to the way that I work on my novels.
I am still keeping a spreadsheet on how many words and minutes I write per day, this is excellent in showing me just how much I actually do, do.
I guessed at the end of January that I wrote around 5 to 8k and only for around ten days of the month, but as it turned out, I realised going back to the spreadsheet that I wrote 36k words all told and wrote for fourteen days throughout the month.
Much more than I realised, it is a confidence booster, it also shows me that there was a time where I thought I didn’t write for two days last month but it was actually five solid days where I didn’t even type one word!
It is a real eye opener!
So, with that being said, I will keep you updated day to day as I am writing. But remember, I have Fridays and Saturdays as my weekend, where I do not intend to write anything and I have scheduled in holidays where I allow myself the time off from writing altogether, unless I feel otherwise. My first holiday from writing will be the last week of February, because this is the time Henry has time off from school and I would like to dedicate my time to him.
Happy reading everyone!
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