How Many More Words?

Yesterday’s word count: 2,448 words

Today’s word count: 2,079 words

NANTUCKET total word count: 79,174 words

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I know. NANTUCKET’s word count makes it look like I’m nearly done, that maybe in a week you’re going to see a post here entitled “I’m Finished!”. (Or, more likely, “I’M FINISHED!!!!”)

But the truth is, I’m only in the middle of my story. I think I’ve probably got another 40,000-50,000 words to go before this first draft is completed (don’t quote me on this later, though, if I do happen to finish with a much shorter draft; the truth is, I don’t really know how many more words are to come).

It’s not because I’m aiming to have a loose and rambling 150,000 word first novel (apparently, such creatures never see the light of published day). I’m not saying the story isn’t loose and rambling, just that the final draft isn’t going to be anywhere near as long as the first draft.

Right now, I have nearly 80,000 words. But I also have several scenes that I’ve marked “variation of …”, because this is the only way that seems to work for me since I’m more or less writing this by the seat of my pants, and it’s become apparent that I don’t always get it right the first time around.

There’s also the little matter of the major changes I made to one of my main characters back when I was hovering at around 35,000 words.

My novel is basically a police procedural, but with a hint of the paranormal. Then one day I got worried that maybe I needed that hint of the paranormal to be a really BIG hit of paranormal. So, since I was kind of at the beginning of things (most of those 35,000 words had been written during last year’s NaNoWriMo) I dumped all the scenes involving this particular main character and wrote all new ones.

But I ran into a problem. Nan (the hint of paranormal character) has been pretty reluctant to go in this new direction. I’ve spent a lot of time second guessing most of the paranormal scenes she was in; they never sounded quite right, so I ended up writing variations of a number of scenes. (In case you’re wondering why I didn’t just go back and revise, one of the things that keeps me writing is knowing that when I’m done, I’ll get to sit down and finally read my words from beginning to end. It’s one of my rewards. So at this stage, re-reading what I’ve written in order to revise would ruin the whole anticipation thing for me … strange, but true).

Today I found myself going back to my original premise – police procedural with a hint of the paranormal. And as I wrote, I finally felt like I was on the right track.

So how many more words? Well, as many as it takes for me to get all of the story down, I guess. It should be smoother sailing from here on in, now that I’ve worked that big-hit-of-paranormal thing out of my system.

Lesson learned here – listen to the truth of the story I’m telling, and not what’s going on in the world of books and publishing …

Anyway, I fully expect to be editing the whole massive thing down to a manageable and readable 80,000-90,000 words. It needs it.

I’m actually looking forward to the editing. I have this funny feeling it will be like sculpting, chipping away all that’s unnecessary in order to let my story take the shape it’s meant to be.

Related posts:

1. On Writing: And When Those Words Flow
2. On Writing: Feeling Disjointed
3. On Writing: Rewriting on the Horizon
4. Writing Goal Update
5. On Writing: The Doubt Thing

Tagged as: first draft, writing goals