Bad Work Day, Good Writing Day...I Guess

[queenoftheskies]

Work was hell again. Sigh...if the owner would just stop spending all the money, the company would do well and everyone would be less stressed and hopefully we could live in peace and harmony once more.

At any rate, I wrote more tonight. I'm tired, so, of course, I'm not all happy with it. But, I'm happy with the volume and hope I can find something worth saving in it all.

Totals for the day:

Beginning of the End 3144 words

94,374 total words to date

I think I'm going to end up over 100,000 words in the finished rough draft, which I still think I can finish by the end of the month. But, I think that's a good thing, since I know I'll need to do a lot of butchering and tightening. Hopefully, this gives me enough raw material to find a story in. :)

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

I've been pondering your question again about the value of continuous writing, and what makes it valuable if it is, and have some fairly coherent thoughts that break down into Short Stories vs. Novels.

Novels first, since I'm assuming that's what you're concerned with the most. Here my original advice about writing constantly stands, if for no other reason than a long stretch really can interfere with the flow of the work--or at least your creative flow. I kept stopping mine to edit, and it ended up taking me two years to finish, which was more than twice as long as it should have taken. And the novel was the worse for it when I did that. The continuous writing may have been crap for awhile, but the more I wrote, the better it did get.

Short stories: I try writing as much as I can, but I may also stop new writing for a few days at a time (as I have this week) to polish and rework something I just wrote. I don't feel that constant writing here is as necessary as improving the piece. From a writer's perspective, writing the end of the novel often tends to make the problem areas in the middle clearer; short stories being so self-contained, it's handy to stop after you've written the end and study it to make sure everything works, it all connects, and so on.

Of course, I've never been able to stop for more than a week; longer than that and I start getting crabby because I'm not doing any new writing. If the short story still isn't working at the end of that week, I set it aside and let it percolate. As I've mentioned in my journal, it can percolate for a long time--months or much more--but so far the percolating has never let me down.

Hope this helps a bit.