1K Per Day

I’m not an outliner. When I have a story idea, I don’t sit in front of my computer or a whiteboard and chart out the plot. No pages of bullet points for me. No colorful lines or color coded pages. Isn’t that what most writers do? To be honest, I don’t really know. I’ve read tweets that lead me to believe they do, but it’s not a question I usually ask other writers—I’m usually too interested in their story, their query, their agent choices, their reasons behind their successes or failures.

That’s not to say I don’t outline, because I do. I just don’t have anything visual that anyone can inspect. I work most of the basics out in my head, digging through the details to decide what has to happen and why. I know where my story needs to start and I know where it needs to end and I work out the points between like they’re a math proof. Did you have to do those in school? Like if A + B = C, then show all steps that’ll get from A + B to C. Okay, that’s too simple of an example because there aren’t any steps between, but you get the idea, right? (If not, you’re out of luck here—I haven’t had math since high school and I blocked most of it from my memory like it was all a traumatic experience.)

Once I have the major plot points decided, I get out my computer and go for it. If I’ve used my mental outlining tool right, the writing part is easy. Getting everything down is just a matter of time. When writing my previous novels, I didn’t really set a goal for myself. The one I wrote in college, I knew I had until April or May to finish. The one about my Paris semester I made sure I wrote something every day, but with no particular word count. By the time I started writing WORLD’S EDGE, I’d been thinking about it for years so I wrote it fast. The sequel to WORLD’S EDGE took me over a year, though that’s because I was planning my wedding at the same time.

Now that I’m writing a new story (see my last blog post New Guy & Old Guy Do Battle for more on that), I decided I wanted some kind of goal. I’m eager to write this one, but I have a lot of other writing things going on. I needed a goal, so I set one—I’m writing a minimum of one thousand words each day. I don’t know if this sounds like a lot or a little to you, but it seemed like a reasonable number to me. It’s not quite a Nano number, but those writers are way more amazing than I am.

So far, things are going well. Today was the first day I struggled to reach my goal, though I blame that on my flavor job, not on anything wrong with my mental outlining tool. At 1K per day and a YA target word count of 60,000-70,000 words, it’ll take me sixty to seventy days to write this novel. That sounds good, right?

When I finish, I'll do some revisions. After, I’ll send it out to my critique partners, though a couple of them have already read and approved the first chapter (which was a huge relief). When they’re finished, I’ll make the necessary revisions. By that time, it’ll be late summer or early fall. It’ll have a been about a year since I entered my first writing contest and depending on how things go with WORLD’S EDGE, I may start entering my new novel in those same contests.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I have to write this thing, 1K per day, every day until it’s finished.