Long Way Gone, Long Way Off
As of today, my novel manuscript has reached 67k words. This is a fairly arbitrary milestone; a round number like 50k (or even better, 100k) might be a better celebration—except for the fact that this is now the longest single work I’ve written.
I started this story back when I was in college; I think in 2016. I’d always been a pretty confident reader, though like many kids, reading often took the backseat to more (superficially) engaging media. It wasn’t until college that it really occurred to me that someone, let alone I could write books; the same realization I’d had a few years prior about film.
I’d written a bunch of stories to that point, but mostly “weird” flash fiction inspired by some of the internet writers I most admired at that time (many of those stories can still be found in the annals of this site, if you know where to look), as well as a number of scripts—some of which had been produced, though most lay dormant. But I’d never attempted a novel before. I spent months outlining and then writing a draft that petered out around 65k words. Still, it was a major accomplishment for me at the time, especially so early in my writing life.
Looking back, I hadn’t even really attempted a "real" short story before. I didn’t really know what writing was all about—often, I think I still don’t. Perhaps because of this lack of experience, I decided to plan and plot everything down to the minutiae. I had a foolproof system. I drew up a full five-act structure for the plot, which was broken down into movements across two “books,” and tracked the developments of the characters, the plots, and the overarching arcs across the length of the book. I made documents for each chapter, with small descriptions at the top of the page. Each day, I just sat down and wrote my part.
In some senses, it worked. There were days I wrote thousands of words, or more. (I spent years following flailing, chasing not just the writing but the ease with which the words seemed to come that first time.) By the end of a couple months, I had a document that spanned about 65k words, and went from beginning to end. I shelved it for a few months (this too was excruciating; I couldn’t wait to see the genius I’d put to paper!) and when I came back, I was deeply disappointed. I’d written something, but there was no life to it. It didn’t flow well together. (Hardly surprising, given my process!) Worst yet, I had no idea where to go from there. I realized I needed to edit it, but I hadn’t yet found the resolve to break it apart and rewrite it fresh.
After that, my writing floundered for a bit. It was hard to not feel like the time I’d spent writing the novel had been a waste. I got out of whack writing the little flash fiction pieces I had been, though in hindsight it was probably time for me to move on from them, anyways. I figured it was also about time I started to get paid for some of the writing I was doing, which led me to refocus my efforts from my blog to external publications. I’m glad I did this, but it certainly contributed to the indecisiveness I felt about the rest of my writing.
It took several years and several false starts to get back into a groove with fiction, to build my confidence back up, and to start writing again. I’d yearned to get back into it, but felt like I didn’t know the way back in, until November of 2022, when I spontaneously fell back into a writing practice, and wrote out a handful of short stories back to back—much more thoughtfully realized work than I ever had before.
I wasn’t not writing in the in-between; I wrote a number of articles for various publications, more than a novel’s-worth of material for Tofugu, and had a span of writing a book review a month for CHIRB. All of this was good, but it wasn’t the work. On word count, I was doing great, but there was still a gap between the writing I wanted to be doing, and I knew it. That’s part of why writing those stories was so satisfying (though it’ll be even more satisfying when someone decides to publish some of them!)
But finally, I feel back in the groove. I’m not sure how much further I have to go—I was aiming for 100k words in this first draft, but having learned from my past, I’ve got no outline to go off of. Each day is completely fresh, just building off of the last day's writing, with my only goal being to write at least 500 words a day—five days a week. And beyond this draft, I plan on only using this as a model for a revision, a complete rewrite once I reach my destination via exploration. The story that first germinated almost 10 years ago has evolved dramatically, and I can’t wait to see where it ends up.
Even now, I know I’m a long way off from where I want to be, but that fills me with enthusiasm, pushing myself to do more, get myself just one step closer to the goal. Most of all, it feels good to be aligned with my goals, working each day towards where I want to end up.
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