I have been struggling along with the first draft of this novel since late March. I had hoped to have the draft finished by the end of June, but it had been a difficult story to write. With short stories, I push through the first draft without looking back. With novels–for which I have far less experience–I have found myself starting, and restarting, which is a bad sign for me in the first draft.
But, I haven’t given up. I decided that the only way to learn how write a novel is to write one, and if that means start and restarting until the story clicks, then so be it.
The story finally clicked.
If you have ever wondering what that click looks like, what that ah-ha moment when the light bulb burns suddenly bright looks like, I think I have a pretty good illustration:
You can see my struggles pretty clearly over the previous 24 days before the story finally clicked. When it did, my writing shot up from a average of under 400 words/day to where it stands today, at about 1,100 words/day. Zooming out, this become more obvious:
I started things right around March 27. The first few days were great, but you can see that slope of decline as I got mired in problems, and had difficult pushing forward. That led to a second attempt, and once again, a spike, but that spike was short-lived, and the daily writing declined. Then, six days ago, the story clicked. I found what I think is the right way to tell it, and I have been pushing forward. The story has taken off.
How do I know? Well, aside from what the data tells me, it is what I feel. I am eager to sit down to write each day, and when I do sit down to write, the time flies by. Over the last 6 days, I’ve average about 40 minutes/day of writing and it flashes by in the blink of an eye. What’s more, I come away with a good idea of what I will write the next day. I have a good vision for the story now.
Since late March when I started this story, I have written 44,000 words. However, I only have about 10,000 words of usable story written so far. For some people those 34,000 words that make up the difference might seem wasted. For me, they were the practice I needed to get to the point where the story clicked. I’m fairly confident the story will move much more swiftly now that it has clicked. But I don’t think I ever would have made it to this point, if not for those 34,000 words worth of flailing.
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