Well That Was Awkward…

 

Remember this post? The one where I raved about how effective those writing speed tips were? I’m running into a problem now.

They were too effective.

I am writing too fast, and too easily.

Wow my life is ironic.

Anyway. In my quest to up the writing ante, I’m finding myself in kind of an awkward situation. I’m writing too much. Or rather, my word count is skyrocketing too quickly. Let me give you an example:

My initial goal for this draft was an 80,000 word novel. My first draft was 100,000 give or take a few words, and I figured that with a more streamlined plot, I would have no trouble backing down 20,000 words.

Oh how wrong I was.

See, the issue is, I’m excited about writing these scenes, and I now know my characters entirely too well. I have not written my first chapter, or the big final stretch towards the ending, and yet I’m already up to 86,319 words (as of writing this). This might not be an issue if I thought I only needed 14,000 more words to tell my story. But I’m going to need more. A lot more. Sometimes I get hopeful and think it will only take 2,000 words to finish a particular scene. And then reality hits me Legend of Zelda style (with the fire walls and everything) and it takes over 4,000.

Seriously. These walls are the bane of my existence. I’m moderately certain that I ran into every last one of them in my quest to beat the Fire Temple Saturday. It’s probably good that Hyrule depends on Link to save it, rather than me…

Sigh.

The worst part of this all is that the majority of those almost 90k words are before the midpoint of my story. So I have a bottom-heavy story, if that makes any sense. Ideally, I try to plan my books to divide evenly with a pivotal scene in the middle, but that just isn’t happening in this scenario. In this scenario, most of my scenes are before the halfway point. Which is a problem.

First world problems much? Anyway.

The good thing about this, I suppose, is that I will have about a million scenes from which to shape my third draft. Surely out of that 110,000 word monster, I can fashion a good story.

Surely.

Success is a dangerous creature, my friends. I’m off to add to the growing pile that is my draft.

Disclaimer:  Every story has different wordcount requirements. In some genres, 100k is a small book, but in Young Adult Fiction (my genre), that is simply not the case. This is why I’m trying to keep my first book down to an agreeable size. If you’re writing an epic fantasy of sorts, though, I doubt publishers would balk at such a large wordcount. 

 On an off-note, I’m planning a new series of posts tentatively titled, ‘Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From Video Games’.

…Or not. I’ll come up with a better title eventually. But in the meantime, while I giggle at that one, feel free to suggest what you’d like to see in future blog posts. While I can rant and rave all day, I’d much rather write something that my readers want to see. Suggestions? Requests? The comment box is open. =)

My brother’s most recent suggestion was the addition of a ‘Man-crush Monday’. I think I’ll have to pass. Surely you guys can come up with something better than that… 😉

Writer out.

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