10/19/07
Words
Lunch: 551 (w00t!)
Home: --
Total: 551
I'll edit sometime tonight or tomorrow with the rest of the count, but I'm pretty pumped about today's lunch progress.
Edit: Ok, so I didn't get anything done at home. BUT, check out today:
10/20/07
Words: 988
I wasn't even planning on writing today, but while I was driving around with my wife, we hammered out the next step in the story, so I came home and wrote it.
Today also marked the passing of a significant milestone for me. It requires a story...
Back in February of 2004, I had an idea. Now, I'd had ideas before, and had even made lazy attempts at writing, but this one really enchanted me, so I started taking notes. Before long, I had written twenty pages of history, character bios, and ideas for where I thought a potential story could go. One thing I kept coming back to was this idea that the characters would have a legend about a hero named Gabriel who had done some great deed. Then, at some point, Gabriel became the story.
The first twenty pages came relatively quickly, though I took frequent breaks to play with other ideas I was having. Then, despite my best efforts at keeping hard copies of everything I wrote, I lost most of the story to a hard drive crash. I kept working on other stuff, but I couldn't bring myself to touch Gabriel.
Luckily, I had given a copy of the work in progress to a friend of mine. She found it, quite by accident, and called me to see if I wanted it back. Emphatic "hell yes!" It was everything but a chapter that I had planned to delete anyway, so I typed it all up...and didn't touch it for a long time. I was stuck.
Finally, I said "screw it," and just wrote with the sole purpose of finishing the damn story. In July of 2006, I reached an ending. The story was 14,078 words, and though I knew it was rushed, I figured I'd fill everything in on revision. I let it sit for four months and gave it a look.
It was crap. I was embarassed. I immediately began a new draft, but... I guess life just got busy. After only a couple weeks of writing, I put it down and worked on some other stuff, then stopped writing as I finished college and prepared for my wedding. I started working full-time at my job, and began using my lunch breaks to write.
In September of this year, I started thinking about Gabriel again, and all the ways I could make his story way better.
Today, when I stopped writing, Gabriel's story was at 14, 928 words -- longer than the original draft. This time I know what I'm doing -- I've taken the focus off the mechanics of the fantasy world and put it on the people who live there, and that has allowed me to flesh out a whole lot more back story than I had before. The result is that even though I currently have more text than I did in my entire first draft, I have a lot more story ahead of me because I'm no longer trying to force my characters toward the next plot point. I'm letting them inhabit their world.
2 comments:
Congrats honey, I'm proud of you.
-your wife
My first manuscript (novel attempt, that is) was an embarrassment. There was no way to ever fix it. I didn't finish it anyway, just wrote about 60 pages and realized that not only did I have no conflict, but I'd also gotten the main characters together way too soon (deadly in romance). The 2nd mss took me a year and was about twice as long as it ought to have been. I finally gave up on trying to fix it, too.
So I think it's cool you've never stopped thinking about this story and that you're working on it again. Congratulations! It sounds like you know where you need to go with it. Life does have a way of getting in the way sometimes, but the story is still there. :)
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