This year I had a longish Thanksgiving break and decided to dedicate that time to working on book three of my fantasy series. Here’s how it went:
DAY ONE: Tuesday, November 22
I hit the ground running, partly because I already had a rough draft of the prologue and the opening chapters.
I zipped along, making additions and corrections while listening to the computer read my draft. Three-quarters of the way into chapter two, a familiar, “I’m going to faint now,” whine sounded from my laptop, followed by the dreaded black screen.
NOOOOO! A computer crash!
To make matters worse, I had been lax when it came to saving my work.
Whenever my older computer crashed, I simply removed the battery, put it back in, then restarted it. My slightly newer model’s resuscitation procedure involved holding the power button while poking a mangled paperclip into a tiny hole on the laptop’s left side. Or maybe the rebooting process required a poke from the paperclip first and then a push on the power button. I tried so many permutations I can’t be sure what brought my laptop back to life.
Thankfully, Word automatically backs up every ten minutes. Upon my computer’s revival, I discovered I’d lost five lines of text. Five lines of pure gold! At least that’s how I remembered them. My recreated lines felt mediocre to me, but technically I’m working on a first draft. Mediocre is allowed.
Lesson Learned From Day One: Back up early and often.
DAY TWO – Wednesday, November 23
I’d set a precedent with my first two books in the “Frama” series. The novels revolve around two characters whose points of view (POV) switch every other chapter.
A few years ago, when I started work on book three, I not only bounced around inside four different characters’ heads, my chapters jumped backward and forward in time. To stay consistent with the first two books, I reverted to alternating between my original main characters: Winnie and Kip. That meant the earlier chapters, dedicated to other characters’ POV’s, required major revisions.
As much as I’d hoped for an effortless writing day, I spent most of my session slogging through scenes and dialog. More than once, I wanted to slap down the laptop lid and call it a day. But I’d made a commitment, so I lumbered forward at the speed of an aged dinosaur on the way to the tar pits.
Lesson Learned From Day Two: Don’t give up; just keep plodding along.
DAY THREE – Thursday, November 24 [Thanksgiving]
Trying to piece new scenes together, and blend them into my earlier, incomplete version, did not come easily. In fact, I hit a speed bump, which often happens. There’s usually a section of my draft that fights me. In the past, I’d stop and wait for inspiration to return. Back then, I didn’t care if inspiration took a two-week vacation. This time, I’d made a promise to myself to take six days to write with the hope of moving book three forward. So I chased down inspiration and wrestled it into the mud until it cried, “uncle!” Then I limped away with three chapters worth of momentum.
Lesson learned From Day Three: Inspiration doesn’t know how to wrestle in the mud.
DAY FOUR – Friday, November 25
After yesterday’s accomplishment, I expected a smoother writing day. Sadly, I got so mired in my POV changes that I imagined a disciplined writer sitting on one of my shoulders and a sloth lounging on the other. The sloth wanted to stretch out and read a good book. This prompted the disciplined writer to ask, “Wouldn’t you rather read a good book that you wrote?” To which the sloth replied, “Wel-l-l …. Y-e-s-s-s-s.”
The sloth and the writer, and I took a walk to clear our heads enough to find and jot creative inspiration into a tiny notebook. Back home, I incorporated those notes into the story, adding more pages to my manuscript.
Lesson Learned from Day Four: Don’t listen to sloths that lounge on your shoulder.
DAY FIVE – Saturday, November 26
This day of writing started just as agonizingly hard as the other days. Just like those other days, I dug deep and kept at it. By the end of the session, I did some math. In my five days of writing, despite the difficulties, I averaged 19 pages a day. One-third of my draft is now complete.
Lesson Learned: If I can write one-third of the book in six days, what’s stopping me from completing the other two-thirds in 12 days? [Hmmm. Is that my next challenge?]
DAY SIX – Sunday, November 27
Those 19-page days fried my brain to such a degree that I didn’t feel up to creating any more scenes. Fortunately, I had a chaotic pile of handwritten notes that needed to be organized and entered into my computer. So that’s what I did.
I don’t know if that counts as a cheat or if it counts as finishing my writing days on a whimper. Either way, my story is much farther along than it was at the beginning of those six days.
Lesson Learned From Day Six: Notes count as writing.
Conclusion: This six-day writing experiment ended up being harder than I’d expected. Still, I’m glad I forced myself to make like a Nike swoosh and “just do it.” My steps might have been small, but even baby steps add up.