Keeping the Outside Worries Where They Belong

 Bizarrely, yes, this blog about being a writer is now starting to see actual posts about being a writer.

I've been hard at work on my novel, which I'm going to avoid being specific about for various reasons, one being that I fear writing too much in describing it will make it harder to actually write the damned thing.

The main thing now is page count. It's funny, when I was a kid in school, first writing essays in middle school English class, I remember how I'd struggle to expand my thoughts and ideas to fit the minimum length needed for a passing grade.

Now, of course, I have the opposite problem.

I've just done some outlining for an arc - not the full story, but just a fraction, albeit an important fraction, of my main character's overall arc. Think of it like the part of The Godfather where Michael goes to Italy for a bit (though my character is nothing like Michael Corleone).

I've been trying not to get too tied up in outlining - as a perfectionist, I often encounter a Zeno's Paradox issue, where I start writing a story, then decide I need to go back and do an outline, then get stuck on the outline because it's not as fun as actually writing the prose of the story, but also feeling like the outline has to be perfect before I can go back to writing the story, and then... you get the idea - you try to do everything with the proper level of planning and preparation and you wind up getting stuck on the planning and preparation.

 I wrote in the last post about how a big part of my process on this project has been to set aside the need to write and only write when I actually want to, and feel the creative juices flowing. That did mean a several-month pause in my progress, but one or two weeks ago I found myself ready to write the next part of it, and I've been plugging away joyfully.

Worries bombard me, though. And one of those worries is how long this creative burst can last.

But what I am telling myself is that I don't have to get it perfect on the first go. Hell, I don't have to get it perfect at all.

I currently have a total of 93,851 words written (to be fair, a few of these are like "Chapter Two: Such and such," but I don't think those are statistically significant. Now, according to the top Google results, the average novel length is 70k to 120k words. Which means that I'm actually really close to the midpoint of that average.

But I have a long way to go.

I will say that I do think I've well and truly finished the beginning of the story. The main protagonist and the two secondary protagonists are on their paths, past "Plot Point One" as we'd say in screenwriting terms.

It remains to be seen, though, how long this story is going to take to tell it. There's so much stuff I want to get to, and that's without doing a formal outline!

Now, I imagine that at some point in the future, I will need to go through and mercilessly cut things down. Who knows, maybe this entire plot arc I'm starting will wind up on the cutting room floor. But while I'm trying not to set any hard and fast rules for my process and just let the story happen, I think I'm going to hold off on cutting it down until I've gotten the full story out.

And hey, the last book in The Dark Tower series was 272,273 pages, so maybe I've got the room (that was the last book in a seven-book series, too, while my intention with this is to just be a single self-contained novel. But also, Stephen King by the time he wrote that one had enough clout to keep the editors at bay. If this book ever gets published, I'd prefer that I not break anyone's wrist with it.)

While I'm not outlining it, figuring that I want the characters as I write them to guide the plot, rather than feeling like they're on rails, I have been trying to take notes of good ideas I come up with. It's just that the most recent set of notes basically created a whole lot of story beats that add up to a plot for the arc.

Anyway, I'm writing the story in different parts, which I can edit and rewrite separately to keep myself sane (being careful to do my best to avoid continuity errors). I've sent the third draft of part one off to a number of friends, and I'm hoping they'll give me some feedback on that (and I also feel nervous, wanting them to enthusiastically love it so that I am reassured that I'm a decent writer but also want them to care enough about it to give me meaningful notes on how it can be improved, but also kind of desperately want them to love it and say it's already amazing because my self-esteem is too tied up in my talent as a writer).

Now, I've got a dream - a hope for this book. I want to get it published, and I can just imagine how much joy it would bring me to see it on the shelves of a book store, and to hear about people reading it and finding some meaning in it.

Again, I'm nervous too - exposing one's work is an invitation to criticism.

I'm not at that step yet. I think in the past that step has seemed so far, far in the future that it may as well be something mythical. But I would like to see that become reality.

Really, for now I just want the story to flow and let it find itself on the page. The process of sharing it, and actually putting it in the hands of those who would make decisions about whether it's worthy of publication, is something that I don't have to think about right now. And, much as my process of just letting the writing happen when it does has been a key to productivity (so far,) I think I'll need to take a similar approach to sharing and pitching it. (Man, even saying "pitching," not to speak of "selling," stresses me out a bit. I guess that tells me I shouldn't worry about it yet).

(But, like, make no mistake: there's a dream down the line that this book gets super popular and someone makes a gorgeous screen adaptation. I mean, the dream, ever since I was six, was to get to see my own stories realized so that I could be there in the audience.)