tysm!!!
1,000 words?! Very nice!
Yeah, I had that problem a lot too. I eventually got to where I forced myself to sit down for an hour or so everyday and work on it; no matter how exhausted I was from work. Even if I only managed like 200 words in that hour because I was so tired, that was still 200 more words towards the end. Progress is progress, can’t put yourself down for achieving it!
Yep, just gotta muscle through
One thing you could do is sit down and make a schedule.
Like; Monday, Wednesday, and Friday you could work on your third choice, and on Tuesday and Thursday you could work on your 1st choice!
Something like that. That way you are still getting work done, but you aren’t leaving your original story sitting untouched for too long either!
I can’t even do writing sprints.
Once I start I am in the zone and write till I get distracted or my body aches or something else. So, no timer or anything like that.
I tried doing that and I HATED it, I dislike feeling restricted when it comes to my writing.
So, I just suffer physically because of it.
So,I refuse to do sprints alone and refuse to do them for less than 20 minutes. But like 30 minutes and compare progress can be fun with the right people. Mini lil contest. Alone and especially during parts i’m excited about I HATE. It takes me a solid 20 minutes to get into the groove so after that i just wanna go lol. I’m really limited on time though so I’m used to not getting long to actually write.
Another thing is, I get really distracted and sometimes if i feel myself struggling to focus i actually set a timer to make myself push a little longer before I take a break lol
I’ve never done a writing sprint before. Lately, I’ve been having trouble going passed 30 minutes on my writing sessions even though I still end up forcing myself to do them for at least an hour (sometimes 2).
A writing sprint might work for me if I do it for an hour and don’t feel like going passed that, but then it’s really just a regular writing session for me; so I guess it’d just be a regular session with a timer in that case (but with added pressure from the timer).
If I was in the zone, then I could see myself going passed it and ignoring the timer telling me my time was up tho.
Hit my 1k a lot easier today. This scene is taking foreveeer though.
Heck yeah! Let’s go!!!
question for y’all: how do you guys manage to write a 50k novel? what substace do you put into it? i’m almost done and I only have like 11k for the whole thing loooool. and i’m not even underwriting
also i’m supposed to be done editing ch. 3 of Enigma by this Sunday evening. wish me luck! :))
Hmm, see i think i have the opposite problem. Im 2k into the beginning portion of a scene and i cant find anything that isnt relvant but why would it take 2k to have someone walk inside a room and introduce a few characters and events?
I think id need to see your writing to give you a guess though. It could be the style you write in or it could just be you only had enough content for a short story or a small novella. How long would you say each chapter is?
I don’t even know how, I just write.
It just happens! When I started writing super seriously back in 2015, most of my works (short stories) would always come out between like 2K to 6K words.
However, after a while I noticed my stories were slowly getting larger and larger. Now I struggle to write something super short, like it is pretty much impossible for me to put something out that is under 6K words.
So I guess it’s something you might build up over time?
(I’ve been writing since 2003, but uh, everything I put out was terrible until like 2016ish and even some of the stuff from then I don’t like that much. But that’s how long it took my writing process to evolve into something “better”)
I think you’ll start naturally expanding out your stories and figuring out how to add more story beats, dialogue, and such with time. It could also just be that the concepts you have don’t need that many words to tell!
That all having been said, having a shorter word count isn’t a negative. You can have the biggest word count in the world, but it won’t mean anything if there is a lot of over description and unwanted padding (something that a lot of writers struggle with). If nothing else, that isn’t a flaw that you’ve developed and may very well end up avoiding all together when your word counts do start getting toward 50K!
I say just keep doing what you are doing! Good luck with your editing
Same-
I mean my first-first novel House of Naivin was over 70k while Project Succession’s other draft was over 115k.
I couldn’t tell you how it happened. It just did. @lunar.eclipse
maybe. each chapter is around 5 pages with edits and buffing up. it can be like… 2 pages without edits.
if you want. a sample here’s a small one:
Enigma ch 1
As I walked into the room, heads instantly snapped towards me. The crowd’s gazes devoured my form, the famous crown jewel of the kingdom. My thoroughly pale skin reflected the chandelier’s sparkle, and I positively seemed to glow from all of the radiance of the room, which helped mask my need to shrink away from it. Instead, I threw my head high, and let my dusty brown hair flow down my back in waves and watched as the crowd’s eyes followed it, hungry for a touch or a smell or a taste of my beauty. Some looked at me with their brown and blue and green eyes, and I stared back with my own grey-blue pair, slightly squinting from the light of the electric candles.
I took one step, then another, barely succeeding forcing myself to walk. The metaphorical mask I had to wear tonight weighed heavily on my chest, my bottled up emotions dying to break loose. I didn’t want to be here. So many people… their expectations for me were crushing me like a rock. I wasn’t the person they thought I was, I was someone else under this façade. I was a gentle soul with a love of books and painting. I had no need for this whole mess. And they didn’t understand
thank you!
did your word doc crash?
I sat down and managed 500 words today. I ought to try and work in more sessions throughout the day, like I used to, instead of putting it off until near bedtime.
I’ve managed part of my current goal by getting my two characters together on an enemy ship. Now I just have to make them go through some stuff and find a way to escape together!
It’s been a long while since I posted here, and I’ll admit that this past year hasn’t been great for writing. I’ve only written a single chapter, 14k words, which is short for my standards, that I just had to brute force to finish, and I thought that I’d be over that hurdle once I had finished that chapter, but I feel like I’m a bit stuck again. Still, I’m determined to get it done before university starts and potentially hit the 400k word milestone.
Get all the dialogue written for the chapter and build towards the endgame. The biggest problem is that I don’t think that I have given enough time to do the ending that I had planned justice. A while back, I wanted to give myself a challenge and significantly expand my cast, and unfortunately, I was a bit overambitious. Over the last 4-5 chapters, I’ve basically been forcing my MC to meet every new member of the cast because otherwise, the ending of my book will not make sense. This has been a very tedious since I have to come up with new backstories and personalities for each other them to separate them out from the others, and I hate writing dialogue. Thankfully, this chapter will be the last cast introduction chapter, where my MC talks to the final two members of the new cast that they’ve barely interacted with.
Here’s the blurb of my first book (though I’m currently working on my second one):
Blurb
Trapped between the stresses of high school life and his fear of upcoming college, Neal feels smothered by the overwhelming amount of change and responsibility he is going to face in the future. However, all of this changes when an asteroid crashes into the moon, pushing it much closer to Earth than anticipated, leading to catastrophic disaster to his large coastal town as the power shuts down and the tidal tsunamis ravage their coastline.
Loosely inspired by “Life As We Knew It”, it is written in a hybrid-diary format, chronicling the fears and emotions of Neal as he and his family struggle to survive in this changed world. Each day is a struggle as the world falls further and further in decay as volcanic eruptions cloud the skies and the waves eat away at the land. No one thinks of the past anymore. The only thought on everyone’s mind is about what comes after.