I'm back and my progress

[mixa]

Well its been a while since i visited these boards..

My novel really suffered in the middle of this year, meaning that no progress took place.

Family woes and a car crash (no serious injuries!!) as well as general laziness really cut short the progress of the story.

But a recent meeting with an old school friend who shares a similiar enthusiasm and interest on writing has stirred the coals and managed to get me going again...

This time, I am taking the appraoch of just flat out writing it....if I recognise there is a problem with dialogue, I just press on, as long as I write out what i meant to say...if there is need for more descriptive text about a forest, mountain, a room, the city, I press on. Obviously if I had the inspiration to descibe it there and then I do.

I just put in brackets () what I need to accomplish. Part of the reason for taking this approach - is that my sister has come on board for the mission!! And I've found she is quite good at filling in the blanks.

So once she has written the bits which I leave out, I then go back and rewrite what she has written.....hehehehe

For the record, I am at 23,000 words as of Oct 2007..

[The Curious Orange]

This is a good way of working. When I started, I wanted to make each chapter perfect before moving on to the last, but I wasn't good enough as a writer to do that. So I just pushed on to the end and decided to fix all the problems later. I find it easier to polish something I wrote years ago than to stare at an empty page trying to decide what to write. Keep up the forward momentum, don't worry how bad certain parts are, and fix the problems afterwards.

[jenna]

You're absolutely on the right track. It has taken me a very long time to let go of my perfectionist nature and just get the bloody writing done. Some of the dialogue I've written is truly, truly heinous, but like you said, as long as I've got the gist of what I want to say on paper I can go back and fix it later. Since finally letting go I've been racing through it, and have doubled my word count in the last 2 months (I've been writing this book for about 3 years!).

[mixa]

Thanks Jenna for the vote of confidence...

Decided for a change in approach today. Pen and paper instead of laptop.

Went to the library, as per usual got sidetracked by two comic books, so read those first.

Finally got done to work. 30 mins later was flowing into my writing when my only pen ran out of ink!!

So I used the excuse to come home and typed it up - only 400 words.

Oh well...

[Jarshen]

Just agreeing with you and orange and jenna, ploughing on works best for me, if I come to something I am not happy with or not thought out yet highlight it and add notes to the start of the chapter for the rewrite (also helps the sensitive ego a bit when you go back and realise that you knew some of this was below par at the time, rather than being horrified at what you wrote.)

Just getting the story down.

[J.G.Thomas]

I have to agree with the above comments. I used to try and write a perfect draft first time around, and it was the quickest route to madness. It took me a long time to learn that the easiest way to work is to just bash the thing out and plug the gaps and dodgy dialogue/descriptions later.

For the first draft, you just need to get the story and characters down. Sure, there will be some poor writing but you'll be able to fix that without much difficulty. If the story itself is down, the rest should follow.

[Birol]

Congratulations and good luck. Just remember one of my writing partners' maxims: It can all be fixed in rewrite.