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10K Thursday: Lessons Learned

 


*wild Muppet cheering* Made it to 10,000 words yesterday (and, more importantly, from beginning to end of a short story) sometime around 10 pm yesterday. I had purposely allowed myself a late start, so I wasn't expecting to be done early...but my productivity really drops off after around 5 pm, so it was a slog to the finish line. The document (11 pt font, space between paragraphs but not lines) came to about 16 pages. 

I wanted to try this because I'm often incapable of finishing stories (I start with a static situation & have a hard time making it move) and because I'd seen a challenge going around online for a 10K a day for 7 days, 70K word novel draft. I adore the idea of a having a complete draft to work with after just a week of a work (instant gratification? c'est moi?). Anyway...before committing to an even more intense NaNoWriMo situation, I thought I'd try it for a day.

First lesson learned: I do not want to do this for seven days straight. Typing this a day later has woken up the shoulder cramps that I was experiencing at the end of the day yesterday and, while I type fairly fast, typing and writing don't happen at the same speed and both fall off precipitously if I have to continue after dinner. I'm a morning person, so I would have to start earlier and essentially give up any other productivity for this project (it might be an unsustainable pace on subsequent days, as well).

Second: Even though I'm not a planner/outliner, I needed story beats to keep going. The day before, I'd spent time selecting character names, coming with up a summary of the theme and basic setting and then a list of beginning-to-end story beats. The bulleted list of these beats was right beside me on the desk while I was typing, so I had a constant reference to where I was in the story and where I needed to go. 

Third: Music. The story is set in a mall, so I listened to several H&M and Zara-based playlists. I wasn't familiar with the music but it did fit the ambience of the story and set a not-quite-dilatory but consistent pace. It also helped with keeping an idea of what the mood should be overall.

Fourth: Finishing is a matter of allowing the story to come to an imperfect end. Most stories change over the writing. I'm not a fan of outlines because I enjoy some discovery along the way...but too little direction often has me wandering aimlessly in the fields of over-description. Story beats were just enough of a trail to keep me moving but I still had to fight my noodle tendency. When I'm drafting (mostly in a notebook), I tend to have quotes from other books I'm reading, suggestions from various internet writing sources, digressions on the day itself (combination of draft and journal because if I combine them, journaling feels more productive) and thus, the Extreme Noodle Tendency.

Overall, a good experiment and I'm moderately happy with the story itself. I'm thinking about writing a companion story in a similar fashion later in the summer. Meanwhile, I'm going to explore how to use the story beats to not plan (but suggest a plan) for a novella based on an old WordCrafters prompt from the BeforeTimes. 

Good reading & pleasant writing!

-- Chrissa

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