Erin Lodes

I have recently had a life change. Or more accurately, a job change. For the past couple months I’ve only been working about thirty hours a week at the job I had. This allowed me extra time to write, which means I’ve been making pretty steady progress. I’ve been completing (when I say completing I mean writing and editing a chapter to the point where I feel it’s coherent enough to send it to John and get his thoughts on it) about a solid chapter a week. It’s been great.

But now, I’m starting a new job. It’s a great job and I’m excited about it but there’s a downside. This job will mean I’m working forty hours a week, so a bit less time in the day to work on writing. In order to meet my goal, which is to finish this entire draft by my birthday in mid-August, I have to not only keep up my chapter-a-week pace, but go even faster.

I’ve lucked out and ended up with a two-week break between leaving my previous job and starting a new one. And I’m going to spend that two weeks fast drafting the rest of novel, probably about 50k worth. Now I’ve completed NaNoWriMo a few times, and granted this is in a lesser number of days, but I’ll have more hours during the day to work.

But I’m confident it isn’t my writing speed that’s going to get me finished on time. Or it isn’t just my writing speed anyway. It’s the complete outline and the other work John pushed me to get done before I started this drafting phase. Today was my first day at it and let me tell you it was wonderful not to look at the blank page and have nothing but a general idea about my story and characters to go off of.

Instead I could look at my scene card and know what was supposed to happen in this scene and the scene after that. Not just a basic outline of events, but also the internal and external goal for my heroine, and her perceived difficulty and real difficulty levels. And not just that either. In addition to pushing me to write a complete outline, John also had me do a lot of character work before I started drafting. So before I started writing my scene this morning, I read through the character information for the characters that would be in the scene, which gives me so much depth to work with. I’ll go into that in a later blog post some day.

The main point of all this is that I’m truly coming to appreciate all the work John had me do before I started this drafting phase. I’d done a lot of work on this book before I met John, but most of it involved writing other drafts. Having the outline and the character information completed now is helping me focus my work, helping me not only write 5,000 words a day but write mostly good words, words I’m likely to keep.

I’ll tell you what. I don’t think I’ll ever attempt a novel without going back to the work John had me do. This whole having an outline and deep character information before drafting thing is really turning out to be awesome.

Anyway, that just happens to be how I feel about it. What do you think?

How I Finished My Novel is going to be an ongoing blog series detailing how I finish this freaking thing. I know, I know, you could probably tell that from the title… I’m being helped along on this journey by John Adamus, who is amazing and you’ll hear a lot about him in this blog series.

If you haven’t already, check out Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.