Hey, Hey, Hey, Heeeeeeey - Write words everyday!

After two nights of writing, I am now 1814 words richer. Assuming the novella will be around 35,000 words, I've got a lot of words left to go.

My goal is to write every day no matter what, and to get at least 100 words per day. It seems like a pretty paltry goal, but that's one of the reasons I set my goal so low. This is not the first time I've "started writing."

Stephen King reportedly writes a minimum of 2000 words per day and in the beginning that was what I set out to do. Of course I soon came to the obvious conclusion that I, in fact, am not Stephen King. This realization eventually crippled my writing because I was constantly missing the 2000 word mark, and whatever that creative juice is inside us that makes writing magic happen eventually just ran out of me.

I am hoping that the low word goal will encourage me to write every day. 100 words is not a lot of words - that's like a third of a double spaced page. In fact, I will probably have four times that number just in this blog post (too bad my blog does not count toward my goal!)

Another problem that I have run into in the past was trying to constantly edit what I wrote as I wrote it. I still struggle with this, and I have to force myself to move on and keep writing. I have to tell myself that, "Yes, its shitty, but we just need to get all the ideas on the page - we can come back and fix it later!"

I've read that sentiment in several writing books, and I have read a lot of writing books. If you constantly try to fix what you have written then you will never finish the book. So my plan is just just write everyday until the first draft is finished, and then after a short break I will start at the beginning and try to convert my story into literature (or at least readable thoughts).

I think my biggest hurdle is that I really don't know what's going to happen in the book. I've got a good idea about this first part that I'm writing, and I'm pretty sure about where it all ends up, but the middle part is very fuzzy. Like scary fuzzy.

Alas, I guess we will find out soon.