Skip to main content

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Turn Away

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse , for #193. Turn away, like the moon, listening... Listening to the planet that rumbles with a hundred million slaps. All the feet, all the rockets, all the  pistons in the cars on the asphalt over the chasm where the veins run deep, blue in sunlight, black at night. Running over the chasm.  Once or twice they ran to you. Once or twice they ran by. Greetings and salutations. The sky is an entertaining shade of concrete yellow as the rain promised earlier in the week makes good on its arrival. It's a disturbing bright sallow sky, the kind of sky that puts you in mind of old movies and degraded film stock and the pops and crackles incidental to the main story.  Several years ago I made a resolution to journal more and last year I came across a video that suggested I actually re-read those journals, at least those of the previous year, at the beginning of each new year. Technically, I have kept the journal resolution, making daily notes in...

The Soul and The Spine

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #195 . Come and share! When it blew out the candle, It began to speak, voice low,  eyes dimmer than flame. Jenn believed, once upon a childhood (she's still there... but it's waning), it inhaled fire. Spines, tonight. Gears ladder bones and metal and plastic, all that lived, rungs to heaven. Heaven is a level of space where you can't breathe  so they used to send the dead. When the flame goes, it takes our memories with it. But not bot files. Maybe it believes  she'll sleep easier if bots go breathless, too. It continues murmuring and she pretends she's hearing a confession in a box Like the song her mother plays when the dark stretches  between signals We can handle shocks. She can handle the dark, the small  not-flame of its eyes. It's finally winter!! Which means bitmapped frost on the roofs, cold mornings, and a table full of succulents that are pretty much glaring at me because the kitchen window isn't the same as full su...

A Single (Terrible) Poem

 I did not buy the poetry book whose sample Was page after page of essay and praise. I'm not following the trumpets. Today I follow the ringers-- Huzzah and call out the streets! Lift your arm, swing the bell; Call out the quiet, call out the neat Call out the loud, call out the bold Call out the wrong, call out the wise We remember the bells We shiver the skies.    This isn't about...anything. It's not about nothing. It should go without saying that a poem shouldn't need an essay or a textbook to be what it is. And I'm not sure why, with a stack of poetry at hand to be read, one silly Kindle sample (and writer's block and anxiety and...) would push my buttons so badly. But seriously. Where is my parody book full of fake blurbs that runs for 50 pages and ends with a single (terrible) poem?  -- Chrissa