photo 1With my previous novel, I had no idea what the story was, but with the novel I’m currently writing, the story came fast, right after the title.

HOW to tell the story, however, was to be the trick this time.

Her point of view, his, her friend’s, his friend’s. Four points of view. Two? Down to one. Chronological order. Some other order.

Finally in October, there it was. One point of view. Some kind of associative order. But I had it. A hundred pages. Polished. Edited. Edited to within an inch of its life actually.

Yes, that’s right. I spent ten months writing a hundred pages.

I was hyper-aware of how little that seemed…

…And that, for my own sanity, I needed to make some horizontal progress.

So I thought, a 1000 words a day. 7000 a week. In 7 weeks I would have a completed first draft–by the numbers anyway. Stay with me-this is not as stupid as it might sound.

I managed to meet my goal for three weeks and hang on to it somewhat after that. And here’s the thing. It was so exciting. I knew, as I was doing it, that some of the writing was crap, but I also knew some of it was really good. And it was good because I had stumbled onto a way to silence my inner critic while I was writing, which was EXACTLY what I needed after so many inner-critic-critical months.

IMG_3826My IC had to sit this last bout of writing out because I DIDN’T CARE what the words were. I just put them down, let Word count them up, and at a 1000 I was done for the day. If you have trouble with your inner critic jumping in before the words can hit the page, try writing for word count.