Day thirty-seven of the writing streak & 85.000 words!
Thanks to yesterday’s “breakthrough”, I spent a big chunk of today’s writing session working on lore and worldbuilding for my story. That’s because yesterday I actually added a new “species” to my novel, and now I had to make sure that they fit into the world that I’ve been setting up over the months. That required for me to figure out where they came from, their basic history, and how their current status affects the plot and the main character.
I feel like laying it out like that makes the task sound a lot easier than it actually is. Especially if you take into consideration that I’m not a huge fan of backstory – I have a tendency to believe that I need it to be perfect before I can write the actual present time plot, and that belief often leads me to get stuck in the past… That’s the reason why I tried to keep things as “simple” as possible today, even though I regularly have to remind myself of it.
With this new addition to my novel and subplot, I’m very happy that I have a deadline to finish working on my current draft, because I know that I could easily end up writing several thousand of additional words just for the subplot, when in reality I don’t think it’s necessary at the stage I’m at today. In order for me to finish this draft, I just need to figure out all the basic and main plot points. All the little details can and will still be worked out over the next drafts. Tomorrow is the deadline for my first draft, and I’m both excited and nervous about it. I’m excited for it because I really want to reach a point where I can finally say that I wrote a full draft of a novel. But I’m nervous because I also feel like there are still so many missing details in my novel. The thing is that I know that I could always find things to add and improve, which could easily keep me busy for several weeks. But I also know that this first draft isn’t meant to be perfect. It’s just meant to exist so that I can discover the novel. I’ll still have as many drafts as I want to add in all the missing details and improve all the “flaws”. That reminds me that another reason for my excitement of finishing the first draft, is that it means I’ll finally be able to start the second draft and improve all the things that I didn’t allow myself to edit throughout the first draft.
I still have one more day to work on this draft though, and even though I’m excited to move on to the next one, I can guarantee you that I won’t waste the time I still have for draft one.