![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wordcount Monday
Dec. 27th, 2021 02:29 pmNovel #4: 51k 52k / 60k
I'm just gunning to finish the first draft at this point. Is that a good idea? I honestly don't know. What I do know is that I'm already planning to rethink/redo some parts of the investigation, and instead of getting stuck rethinking things over and over again, I might as well work with a complete draft, even if it's a crappy one.
(It's even possible that the incomplete draft is causing me enough anxiety that I've been losing sleep, since I've had sleeping problems until I reached 50k words yesterday. Either that, or the new stress-relief tea I started drinking last night really worked. Either that, or spending a little bit of time yesterday writing a different project calmed me down?)
I've been outlining a couple of my favorite mystery books in order to try to glean some techniques from them. I even outlined an Agatha Christie book, only to realize that I will probably never be able to pull off that level of complexity and interweaving so many subplots/red herrings throughout.
I keep thinking that maybe I can make my crappy draft less crappy if I can generate a reverse outline from it to diagnose the problems I'm having in the murder mystery, although the second major issue I'm having is that I feel like some of my scenes just suck and I need to figure out how to make them better. And the third issue I'm having is that I do want several intrigue subplots interwoven throughout the protagonist's murder mystery investigation, but right now I can't figure out how to pull them off since I'm busy enough just trying to have the murder mystery make sense.
Sigh.
(I forgot to mention, but my wordcount is a little over 1k words shot (and has been for a while) because I have about 2/3 of the final chapter, but have decided not to finish writing it until I'm done with everything else.)
I'm just gunning to finish the first draft at this point. Is that a good idea? I honestly don't know. What I do know is that I'm already planning to rethink/redo some parts of the investigation, and instead of getting stuck rethinking things over and over again, I might as well work with a complete draft, even if it's a crappy one.
(It's even possible that the incomplete draft is causing me enough anxiety that I've been losing sleep, since I've had sleeping problems until I reached 50k words yesterday. Either that, or the new stress-relief tea I started drinking last night really worked. Either that, or spending a little bit of time yesterday writing a different project calmed me down?)
I've been outlining a couple of my favorite mystery books in order to try to glean some techniques from them. I even outlined an Agatha Christie book, only to realize that I will probably never be able to pull off that level of complexity and interweaving so many subplots/red herrings throughout.
I keep thinking that maybe I can make my crappy draft less crappy if I can generate a reverse outline from it to diagnose the problems I'm having in the murder mystery, although the second major issue I'm having is that I feel like some of my scenes just suck and I need to figure out how to make them better. And the third issue I'm having is that I do want several intrigue subplots interwoven throughout the protagonist's murder mystery investigation, but right now I can't figure out how to pull them off since I'm busy enough just trying to have the murder mystery make sense.
Sigh.
(I forgot to mention, but my wordcount is a little over 1k words shot (and has been for a while) because I have about 2/3 of the final chapter, but have decided not to finish writing it until I'm done with everything else.)
