My last post here about my writing, was almost half a year ago. Unbelievable. Six months actually sounds like less time, but still that’s half a calendar’s worth of days.
Six months ago, I would have been sure my novel would have been finished by now, but unfortunately that is not the case. During those almost 180 days, many things have changed, both in my novel and my life.
While I’ll keep the personal stuff personal—I’m sure very few people are interested in my life outside of writing—I will share the writing stuff in case anyone reading finds it useful or inspiring.
Regarding my novel then...it has undergone yet more changes. I am presuming/hoping this is the norm for debut writers.
My beginning has changed YET again, my characters’ names have all changed, despite me spending literal days choosing them, and my book title has changed. All I believe for the better, otherwise why make them 😊
However, the premise of my story has remained the same. This, I am hoping, is a good thing. We’ll see.
Here are reasons behind some of the changes, in case you might be interested:
Names: Seems every book I picked up during the last few months had at least one character with the same first name as one of my characters. Not a huge issue, but I decided I wanted my characters’ names to be something different from those I was reading about.
Title: I changed my title to better reflect the storyline. I’m a lover of one word titles, especially for suspense novels, and am always drawn to books whose titles are one bold word, and I wanted the same for my novel. I love my current title and don’t foresee changing it again. (Can I uncross my fingers now?)
Characters: As mentioned in my last post, which I know I wrote yonks ago, I dropped one POV and added a new one from a new character. This was a very hard decision, as I lost half of my word count, but it was completely the right thing to do. Hopefully, you will meet my characters soon!
One of my biggest challenges in writing is to stop myself going backwards instead of forwards. I tend to edit my previous day’s writing before adding words. This may help me have a more polished first draft than if I just continued writing forward each day, but it also hinders me to a certain extent.
An example of this would be my opening chapter. I wrote, edited, wrote, edited it about twelve times (no lie), each time sure it was for the last time. Well, wrong. When I added the new character, I decided to almost completely rewrite chapter one—maybe the thirteenth time will be lucky—I am actually very happy with it now, and believe it is the best opening I have written yet. Until I rewrite it, of course. 😊
Along with rewriting and editing, the last six months have been busy with more creative writing classes. What can I say, I am a bit addicted to them. I plan to write a post solely about the different classes I have taken sometime soon, so if creative classes are something you are interested in, check back for my personal opinions on them, and a list of the ones I have taken.
I will close this rather lengthy post, by sharing, I am now at a chunky 58K, which is more than half-way there, I hope.
Weekly, possibly daily, update posts will be coming, as if nothing else, they’ll help me stay accountable.
If you are like me, knee-deep in your debut novel and at times you feel like giving up (like me), keep going. Word by edited word, we will get there. Persistence, stubbornness, dogged-determination, whatever you want to call it, that’s what will get us over the finish line. We can do this!
And just like that I have written more than 600 words. Why can’t they flow this easily and quickly for my novel? Asking for a friend :)
Happy writing friends,
Cat xx