Writing A Novel - Second Day of Writing
The titles of these daily journals are already a mess, but that’s fine. The important thing is that the writing happens and I do the journalling afterwards, not what I actually call these posts.
This is my second day of actually writing this thing. I did another hour this morning, a set of three Pomodoros that were intended to be 20 minutes each with a 5 minute break in between them. The third set got interrupted at 13 minutes but if fell right at the end of a scene anyway, and that felt like a natural breaking point, so I don’t mind too much.
The word count for my Pomodoros this morning was 643, 866, and 553, which comes out to an average of around 2,350 words per hour. The manuscript is currently at 4,343 words. All of that is chapter 1, which I was aiming to get done in 3,000 words, but that estimate wasn’t based on anything other than gut instinct and I’m not going to worry about it at this point.
Before I sat down to write I journalled in my notebook for five minutes about what I wanted to achieve with this morning’s session, and I think that helped. It got my brain warmed up and ready to go, and I was able to pretty much hit the ground running, with a tiny stumble right at the start of my first Pomodoro. When I stopped yesterday it was in the middle of a scene and I remember thinking I had a good idea about where it was gong to go next. I foolishly didn’t write this down, so when I read back my last couple of paragraphs this morning I was initially at a bit of a loss as to how to continue. I got over it, though.
I’m wondering if I should have broken down my chapter outlines a little more and outlined individual scenes within those chapters, but I’m not going to worry about that yet. If I get a few chapters in and find I’m spending a lot of time wondering what I’m supposed to be writing - if I find that the outline isn’t actually useful, that is - then I’ll revisit it, but for now I’m just focusing on words. Chapter 1 isn’t perfect by any means, I know that, but it’s coming together nicely and I’m excited about where it’s all going.