50,000 Words In And More Lost Than Ever
The train wreck that is me trying to finish my first novel
I love to write. I love the feeling when you’re in a flow state, words seamlessly trailing through your brain to your fingertips onto the keyboard. I love how inspiration often comes at random times. I love how even if it’s 2 A.M. that feeling of excitement will push me to figure out a scene.
That’s how I’ve written my book so far; doing my best to come up with a rough plot, but for the most part, letting my heart write what a younger me needed to hear. I love how personal my story feels, and I especially love how oftentimes, I end up with a completely different scene than the original one I intended.
Never would I have pictured myself writing a young adult fantasy book. Two years ago, I never thought I’d even write a book at all. Even though I’m 21 now and technically out of that age range, I definitely still feel like someone who easily fits into that target audience. When I first started to seriously pursue writing about a year ago, I spent so long trying to prove that I had the emotional maturity of someone well beyond my years, the grammar skills of someone with an English degree. I worked so hard to make my writing appear effortless.
They say write what you know. Yet somehow I found myself in the midst of a medieval battle with my pen becoming my sword, fascinated by a world in which I knew nothing. And yet, as I work my way deeper into the world, I’m often writing about my own experiences.
My brother is also a writer. He focusses primarily on fanfiction, but his stories are often over 100k words and I very much consider them novels. He writes with strict outlines, then systematically works through that outline. He can accurately predict not only the approximate wordcount of the piece, but how long it will take him to finish the story. A very logical approach.
I tried that approach, but always felt trapped. My writing became dull, lackluster; losing that chaotic sense of passion that now comes through so strongly in the majority of my work. In fact, that’s why I don’t spend too long on an outline. I never can seem to stick to one. As I write, more thoughts and details come to me in a chaotic web that are hard to untangle.
But now, I’m at that part where I have to do the untangling. Filling in the holes of parts that I didn’t feel like writing at the time, making sure the story makes sense, doing my best to make myself more eloquent than I normally am.
Needless to say, I’m definitely not a ‘plotter’ author, but I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a true ‘pantser’ either; I’m somebody that writes “vibes”. I don’t always know what’s going to happen in the story, but I do now how my characters feel, and the overall message I’m trying to get across. I let my characters tell me who they are, how they spend their days, and what preoccupies their thoughts. I love exploring the loopholes, the plot holes, the character flaws; the catch 22 that is no matter how you try to write your way out of one, another arises.
I think the most accurate simile is that I write like a dog chasing his tail. But in that spinning, I often find find myself at an entirely new destination that I was completely unaware of until that very moment. Sometimes, my brain goes so fast I forget to even type down the words I’m thinking, leaving quite the surprise when I go back and edit.
Yet somehow, I still write fairly concisely, perhaps the consequence of an excited mind. I want every word to have meaning, every sentence to be important in and of itself. Through the editing process I often double or triple the length of my chapters, which is making this whole process right now quite grueling.
But through that editing process, that’s when the self doubt creeps in. My writing is unknown, am I even good enough to be an author? What if all this time is spent for nothing? Those are questions I never let myself linger on for too long.
At the end of the day, I love to write. There’s a feeling of satisfaction I get from seeing the words on the page, knowing that in that moment, I had something really specific in mind. Those particularities are often lost over time, but that’s when the magic happens; the exact same words now hold a different meaning. Just like how those exact same words will be different for different eyes and minds.
So write. Write more. Be fearless in your edits. What are you waiting for?
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