I’m almost 20k words into writing my book. I started on January 1 and set a goal of 250 words per day and had a solid plan to get this thing done in a strategic way. I started off hot and heavy and very excited. I had a great idea. I was passionate about it. I felt this story was the one.
And then all of that quickly went out the window. I started. I stopped. I started again. I threw everything out. Then I stopped altogether for a couple weeks and wondered if I had set a stupid or unachievable goal for myself to write this book this year.
I would get in bed at night and all I would think about is the darn book. What was I going to write? I was so far behind. I worried. I tossed and turned. I had ideas then I quickly shot them down. In short I was getting in my own way.
All this time I have know that the only thing that’s going to get the book done is the actual writing. Not the brooding. Not the questions. Not the planning and plotting. The actual sit my butt in a chair and face the screen and write writing.
So when I got another idea for the book I sat down and did just that. I let it all pour out. Word after beautiful word. And then inevitably I hit a point where I started to question everything again. Was it any good? Who would read it? Did I even care? And I almost fell into the trap of stalling out again. Telling myself I’d have a better idea and that would be the thing to take me through to the end. And this is where my athlete instincts kicked in – the pain is temporary and it doesn’t control me. Keep going.
So I sat down again and wrote. 4K, 5k, 10k, then 15k flew by. I just tried to get it all out and not judge, not edit, just get out of the way. And now I have a large enough piece of writing that I can look at it and ask myself what am I really trying to say? How do I want to introduce these characters? What matters? And I got there by being verbose.
Storytelling is an art. What I’m learning is you don’t always get it right on the first try. What matters is getting it all out. The honing comes later.
I’ve been writing my whole life – poems, songs, blogs and articles, and now a book. The process might be different for all of those, but the bottom line is you don’t have anything until you have words on a page or a screen.
Having too many words isn’t a bad thing. It allows you to go back and mine for gems. And now going back through what I’ve written it’s clear to me what’s working and what’s not. And I might not have been able to see that or even gotten those gems to come out of my brain if I had tried to write them perfectly the first time.
Maybe at some point in my writing career I’ll get good enough that I’m able to write the gems on the first try, but for now my goal is to get as many words out of my head as I can each time I sit down at the screen. And to create some space in my head to then look at what I’ve written and see the gold.
