Bad Habits Learned Here |
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NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Location: C. of Letters Status: Offline Points: 5401 |
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Posted: 13 Oct 2021 at 11:15am |
I have a really big project I've worked on here and there since forever. The pace and sequence were a source of constant struggle, so I wrote the entire piece from a different perspective. Sort of the Maltese Falcon from the standpoint of the statue. It's a McGuffin view. It took two months and worked out to about 143,000 words. Edit a bit to tighten up the pace and sequence, add some detail, and I set an arbitrary goal of 150,000 words total. And here I am, one eye obsessively on the word count, add two here and remove two there. On a piece with, currently, 150,000 words. Exactly. This is, easily, NYCM's fault. 150 times the size of flash fiction. 60 times a round 1 short story. Still have to watch that word count... ...but I can still write an entire post without a single gerund. Some of the habits I learned here are good.
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LadyArkham
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 21 Nov 2020 Status: Offline Points: 3806 |
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Congrats on the impressive project!!! That is a fantastic accomplishment.
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NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Location: C. of Letters Status: Offline Points: 5401 |
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Now I have to finish the real project. Those 150,000 words just gave me the cadence and sequence of events. No more excuses!
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Mrsnetpro
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 20 Nov 2020 Location: NJ Status: Offline Points: 601 |
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You are my idol, I've been stuck at 65,000 words on my fiction for a year now. Every time I go back to it all I want to do is rewrite.... I think having interest from agents (who have probably long forgotten about me as I fully expected to be done with it in a reasonable amount of time!) makes me feel I need to keep changing it.
And to your point when I do edit, I am making my words count and apparently that's part of my problem.
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Suave
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 25 Jan 2015 Location: Thailand Status: Online Points: 25027 |
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I have found the only way to avoid what you are doing is to skip rereading before starting, haha. Just like you, I can't help starting to tweak and before I know it I am working from the beginning.
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NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Location: C. of Letters Status: Offline Points: 5401 |
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Don't think for a second you're in any way unique. I can tell stories about hours, days, and weeks spent with a book that hasn't been written yet. I know the general story layout so the McGuffin view, which is limited and first person, was easier than expected. It also changed the story, because big plot points I had 'planned' simply didn't make sense. One of them turned into something else entirely. There is a notebook with 200,000 words or so, and a lot of those words went quietly into that good night. I'll have to revisit some of the 102,000 words in the main story because the new direction makes much better sense. That's the business we're in. If you're stuck it might be because you've put yourself into a corner. That's generally what sticks me...I'm off somewhere the story doesn't belong and at a dead end. So start a new document and write your 65,001th word and just...play. If they were in the middle of a firefight have them drop their guns and do an impromptu ballet. Just get the characters back into your head and off in a new direction. It doesn't have to make sense. If you're me you might have to revisit a lot of those first 65,000 words, because I learned how to write as I went. I still have the original drafts. [Gerund Count: 0. Take that, Nod!]
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Suave
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 25 Jan 2015 Location: Thailand Status: Online Points: 25027 |
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Well, I have one that I am editing and changing most of the names in. It is nerve wracking. Writing my way into a corner is what i do constantly, one of the reasons it takes me so long to write big projects, it comes form not having it all ironed out before I start, the thing I do, haha.
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NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Location: C. of Letters Status: Offline Points: 5401 |
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Search is your friend when a character's name needs to change. Saved me a couple times. As for corners, you can get into those in short pieces. Sometimes the point where the story went off the rails was the second word. Put down the big reveals or twists so you write to a destination that's closer than the end. It's a little like binary division and can simplify the problem.
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Suave
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 25 Jan 2015 Location: Thailand Status: Online Points: 25027 |
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I have the fear that the search will not find them all due to some code being left over or some such thing that the search does not recognize anymore. I do use the search destroy, but as I have seen other books where things such as names can appear as other, I still do read through for each, and am betting that I still miss something, haha.
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