Writing Report March 1, 2024

As I pen this (literally, sitting in the auto dealership waiting area while they service my car), I have crested the 87K+ mark on my current WIP.

When I started writing it on January 1, 2024 I wondered if I had enough of a story to reach 50K, the minimum acceptable word count for a novel.

Now I’m nearly at the 90K mark (and may reach that by the time this post goes online) and realize at best I’m only 3/4th of the way through my story.

I tend to write shaggy and loose.

One thing I always do in my first drafts is to go w-a-a-a-y overboard in my descriptions and explanations.

This is typical with my first drafts as I need to tell the story to myself in great and exacting detail so I understand every aspect of it.

Later, in the second draft, I whack out redundancy and excessive verbiage, often trimming tens of thousands of words.

(There is a third draft after that,
but those edits are more for
style / tone / texture.)

I rarely write from detailed outlines.  There’s usually a three page document that lays out the broadest story points and indicates what types of characters and conflicts my protagonist/s will face, but the actual writing itself is a work of discovery, not filling in blank spaces.

Case in Point: 
At roughly one quarter of the way in on my story, I realized one supporting character could lead my protagonist to another bunch of interesting supporting characters and that together they could help my protagonist out in the last quarter of the story.

So I began writing scenes involving these characters so that in the end when they ride to the rescue (not literally; it isn’t that kind of a story), they wouldn’t come across as an arbitrary deus ex machine.

Only as I continued writing / discovering the story, it began to evolve away from this colorful group of characters, heading off to the anticipated climax via an alternative route.

Right now the colorful supporting characters stay in because their scenes are fun, but come draft two their participation will be severely truncated if not completely eliminated.

As Arkady and Boris Strugatsky observed back in 1964, it’s hard to be a god.

© Buzz Dixon