Midpoint
A lot of people have asked me lately how the writing is coming, so I thought I would give you all an update. First of all, yes - I am still writing! Second, it has been a slow month and a half. I actually had a luxuriously long winter break, as well as a few unexpected but necessary non-writing things I needed to spend my writing time on over the last few weeks. So it has been an extended break from regular writing, but I'm back in full swing now and am working on my main writing project - a children's chapter book.
I think the book will be around the 7 to 10 year age range. Longer than the Ivy and Bean and Puppy Place books for those of you who are familiar with those. And similar in style to The Year of the Book and The World According to Humphrey books, spanning the course of a year or a semester and detailing the everyday events and people that make up a young girl's life.
So I'm back at it and somewhere around the midpoint of my book. I think.
One thing I've discovered since entering the writing world is that writers talk about book length in terms of words, not pages. This is still something my brain is getting used to and I occasionally say things like "I'm going to write 50,000 pages" instead of a much more reasonable goal of "I'm going to write 50,000 words." I also find this metric frustrating because authors don't advertise their books in terms of words, and websites selling books don't list the number of words - they list the number of pages.
Anyway, at my writers conference last fall, I set my word goal for my book at 50,000 words. That was based upon the fact that most adult books are around 80,000 to 100,000 words. While data on children's books is harder to find and much more variable, I recently did a miniature test by counting the estimated average words per page of my comparable books. I estimated The Year of the Fortune Cookie to be 27,720 and Imagination According to Humphrey to be 41,760.
So if I stick to my planned 50,000 words, it's going to be a longer book, though I assume it will probably shrink when it comes time to edit. (On a side note, at a writers event I went to recently, they discussed words that writers tend to overuse, like 'really' and 'amazing'. I thought, "This won't apply to me." But I did a quick search of one of the words - 'just' - and what do you know, I use 'just' all over the place! I came home and joked that I may have just cut my book by half just by taking out the word just!)
Anyway, I am currently at 21,088 words. So almost halfway there. And that lines up with the plot diagram I've created as well. I just finished the first half of my plot diagram with today's writing.
Now that we've covered the statistical answer to how's the writing going, I will add that from the heart and inspiration standpoint, this has been the hardest stretch of writing that I've done. I don't know if that's what all authors experience around the midpoint of their book, but I have been struggling with the feeling, the oompf, behind it. I have revised and revised my plot diagram and am back on track with my timeline and chart.
But it feels so much more structured than my earlier writing, almost like an assignment. Ahh my earlier writing . . . those early chapters before I had a plot diagram, or even knew what one was. When I created scenes because they were fun and I felt excitement about the characters and the story. And the story just flowed effortlessly.
Maybe I just hit my limit of how much I can write in one day. I usually aim to write 1,000 words, but stuck with it today until I wrote 1,500. Perhaps because I was afraid that I needed to make up for lost time. After writing, I listened to Liz Gilbert's Magic Lessons podcast and she said something like "creativity and grief both have their own timelines, no matter how much we try to make them adhere to our own deadlines."
So maybe I'm rushing things and cramping the story in the process. Or maybe I just need to edit and rewrite the last few scenes. Or maybe this is just how it's supposed to feel in the middle. I'm not sure. But I am sure that I'm committed to figuring it out. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But eventually, when the time is right.
