Two weeks have now passed into my new fiction writing project and what I’ve been a bit surprised by is the fecundity required to generate, unceasingly, two-thousand words a day, which has generally been my target. (Needless to say, I have definitely not been consistently hitting this daily goal.) I’ve always enjoyed writing, but other than a few Novembers when I attempted NaNoWriMo (without succeeding), I’ve never tried to consistently hit daily word counts when I write. I historically just wrote when I was struck by a particular idea or thought that I found intriguing. Being forced to hit a daily count is exhausting though. Maybe I’m doing something wrong? I honestly don’t know.
Once you set off on a journey produce an actual, complete fictional product though, the process changes a bit. It’s an interesting project of mixing several components: Of course, the writing. But there’s also editing, revision, ideation, and organization. There have been some days in the past two weeks where I’ve written zero new words and either just edited/revised old writing (trimming fat, adding color, etc) or just brainstormed and organized, doing a lot of “meta-writing” like tagging certain passages or writing out certain ideas/characters/plots just so they make more sense to me. That “meta-writing” is a bit like commenting code when I program my day-trading bot (which I’m also simultaneously still slaving away at! Need to find a way to pay the bills!) None of the comments compile into any assembly, obviously; they’re just there to help me keep track of what’s going on. Between day-trading, writing, and seeing doctors and taking meds, it’s all been pretty draining. Yet, where there’s a will there’s a way. “Every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” Confucius once said (I think).
I don’t know if I’m doing this right, but I’m currently just trying to race through 100,000 words as fast as humanly possible so I can get some sort of scaffolding up, even if I know I’ll have to eventually toss some here or there; or revise heavily. It’s much easier to carve an ice statue once you have an actual block of ice.