Dispatch #1 of Work in Progress

we'll be counting stars

This is the first update in an occasional series on the process of writing a novel. To receive these updates in your inbox you will need to turn on Notifications for the “Work in Progress” section of this newsletter, which you can do in your subscription settings. Or you can just DM me and I can turn on the notification for you. Thanks for following along!

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word count

as of April 13th: 32,200

what’s been working

• Word count goals! …After avoiding them for a long time. Lately I’ve been hitting somewhere around 1,200-1,500 words per day, with exceptions. Breaking it up into a couple writing sessions throughout the day rather than just one session is helping.

• Attending the

  London Writers' Salon
  Writer’s Hour a few mornings each week. It’s a free Zoom session for 50 minutes of uninterrupted writing. One thing I love is witnessing how much of writing is staring at a screen or a notebook or into the void; frowning, eyes vacant over a mug of coffee or tea, a look of amusement, pensive chin rubbing, head dropped into hands, chewing on a pencil or fingernail. It’s nice to see that all of this really is writing, as in, it’s not just me and it’s not having nothing to say. The Writer’s Hour concludes by emailing an inspirational quote after the session, and I thought this one from last Thursday was lovely:

May your imagination know

The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,

And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all

The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields

And something original begins

To stir toward your senses

And grow stronger in your heart

– John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

mood music

Sometimes I like to listen to music that gets me in the mood of a certain scene or in the head of a character. I just wrote a tough scene with the help of the following two songs. That John Moreland one especially gets me every time.

snags

• Spent a good chunk of time one afternoon transferring the draft from a Pages doc to Scrivener. This was tedious. I organized scenes and chapters a bit, which seemed necessary because I’d sort of hit a wall with my plot. I am not a plot person. My plot comes from writing the characters and seeing what they do, and the plot more or less shapes itself, but I am finding that a novel plot demands a lot more than that of a short story. (I suppose this should have been obvious?) So I thought I’d get organized and see where the plot might be headed. This was…mildly helpful.

• Scene organizing showed me I needed to do some research for one of my characters. She has a project going in the book that seems important and I could no longer write around it. Plus I needed to get into her head more, and she is a scientist and I am not. So I spent a day doing mostly research. Still much more research needed, but I told myself I’d give the research a single day and then back to writing for now. I am easily bogged down and side-tracked in research mode.

• All of these “snags” have been helpful to writing the book; they’re only “snags” in that I wrote less words (or no words) in the draft on those days. This next “snag” is no exception. I am participating in the community writing prompt, Future of Nature, hosted by

  Julie Gabrielli
  and
  Claudia Befu
  . I decided to take a couple characters from my book and use very loose versions of them as characters in the short story I’m writing for the prompt. I gave them different names so that I don’t feel constrained to make them the same characters, but I am using this as an exercise to flesh them out a bit. It’s a different plot, a different world, really, even though the settings look similar, so I doubt I’ll use any of the story in my novel. But I see it as a way for me to play with my characters and get to know them better. That has taken time away from the novel while I worked on the story, but it feels good to get out of my comfort zone, which this imaginative prompt absolutely is, plus it has been fun participating in the lead-up discussions and reading. That said, I’ve taken about a week off the prompt and need to get back to it because the deadline is approaching!

A new series I am enjoying, on writing discipline:

Establish the Habit. Short essays with good advice that are relatable and easy to digest. Here’s a line from

Paul Crenshaw

, On Failure:

It takes time. It takes work. It takes practice and attention and it is never easy to give time and attention in a world that more and more devalues the written word, and demands more and more of our attention.

For more, check out his new Substack below. (He has an existing Substack which is also great, here.)

Are you writing a book, or some other big writing project? What helps you keep going? What are your thoughts on word count goals? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.