Halfway There

I reached the halfway point of the first draft in my novel-in-progress last night. I know it's the halfway point because I've written a bare bones outline (see Plotting Your Novel! below) and, at the moment, there's forty chapters plotted and I just finished Chapter 20. Also, it's at page 150, and that's a good round halfway point.

I don't know if it's like this for all writers, but for me, the number aspect of writing a book always looms large. It shouldn't, but it does. I try to write at least 1,200 words a day covering about 5 pages. If you were to do this every day, in exactly 60 days you'd have yourself a 300 page rough draft. Of course, it doesn't work out so easily and there are several days lost to weekends and periods of time when the book isn't developed enough in my mind to go forward, and I have to sort of mull it over by playing video games, going on walks, and just generally not thinking too hard about the book. I also have to take breaks in the current novel to go back and edit the one before it as it goes through various stages of production.

I'm well aware that mere numbers and word output doesn't exactly make a great book, but I guess I use numbers to keep myself motivated (as if starvation weren't motivator enough) and to track the novel's progress as I go along.

1 comments:

Caleb said...

Yeah, it's encouraging to see the page count go up... even if it's not good, you have more grist to feed into the mill. In the same way it's discouraging when the plot gets off course, and you have to delete or rework 5000+ words to get it back on course... :-(

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